In the Event of Women 9781478021742

Citation preview

In the Event of W ­ omen

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t h e n I

EVENT of

WOMEN Tani Barlow

Duke University Press ​· ​Durham and London ​· ​2021

© 2021 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Arno Pro Regular and Barlow by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Barlow, Tani E., author. Title: In the event of ­women / Tani Barlow. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020052856 (print) lccn 2020052857 (ebook) isbn 9781478013518 (hardcover) isbn 9781478014447 (paperback) isbn 9781478021742 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: ­Women—­China—­History—20th ­century. | ­Women in advertising—­China. | Feminism and mass media—­China. | Mass media—­Political aspects—­China. | Advertising—­Social aspects—­ China. | Events (Philosophy) | bisac: history / Asia / China | social science / ­Women’s Studies Classification: lcc hq1767 .B3627 2021 (print) | lcc hq1767 (ebook) | ddc 305.4095109/04—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020052856 lc ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020052857

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Rice University Dean of Humanities, Chao Center for Asian Studies, and the Department of History, which provided funds ­toward the publication of this book. Cover art: General Electric bulb girl at advertising desk, dfzz 19, no. 1 ( January 10, 1922).

To Ruri

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Contents

Acknowl­edgments ​ · ix

Introduction to the Event ​· 1 CHAPTER ONE  

Conditions of Thinking ​· ​19

CHAPTER TWO  

Foundational Chinese Sociology ​· ​71

CHAPTER THREE  

Vernacular Sociology ​· ​​100

CHAPTER FOUR  

The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera ​· ​​123

CHAPTER FIVE  

Nakedness and Interiority ​· 162

CHAPTER SIX  

Wang Guangmei’s Qipao ​· 191

Conclusion ​· ​​220

Notes ​ · ​ ​231 Bibliography ​ · 259 Index ​· ​283

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Acknowl­edgments

­ here are so many friends and colleagues I want to recognize and T thank. On archival issues and questions of detail: Bridie Anderson, Richard Carkeek, Chen Jing, Chen Zu’en, Sherman Cochran, Christian dePee, A ­ ntonia Finnane, Grace Fong, John Foster, Lara Friedenfelds, Bryna Goodman, Michael Griffey, Chris Hamm, Yukiko Hanawa, Hao Xiaowen, He Qiliang, Robert Hegel, Hsiang Jieh, Max K’o-wu Huang, Ruri Ito, Nick Knight, Ellen Laing, Fabio Lanza, Li Hsiao-­t’i, Miho Matsumura, Christopher Massie, Barbara Mittler and Kaja Meuller-­Wang (who allowed me access to their online heidenc, Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg version of the New Erya while I was in China), the late Andrea Noble, Thy Phu, Martin Powers, Qian Nanxiu, Yuanzhu Bamboo Ren, Leon Rocha, Alessandro Russo, Sakamoto Hiroko, Andrew Satori, Haun Saussy, Laurie Sears, Zhijia Shen, Nicola Spakowski, Christine Tan, Ta Trinh, Kathy Tsiang, Suzanne Vromen, Ann Waltner, Wang Hui, Wang Xiaoming, Diana Xu, Yu Chien ming, Zang Jian, Peter Zarrow, Judith T. Zeitlin, Madeline Zelin, and Jennifer Ning Zhang. I am grateful to the following for translation support: Yizhong Gu, Robert Hegel, Nicole Huang, Liang Xia, Miho Matsumura, Haun Saussey, Yukiko Shigeto, and Judith Zeitlin. To the following, I remain awed at my good fortune to have enjoyed your scholarly hospitality: Chen Jing, Chen Yungfa, Chua Beng Huat, Ruri Ito, Helena Kolenda, Liu Kang, Naoko Miyaji, Navaneetha Mokkil, Alessandro Russo, Yu Chien ming, Zhou Xian, and Kathy Woodward. I am indebted to their institutions: the Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington; Asia Research Institute, Singapore; the Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice University; the Program in Global Sociology, Hitotsubashi University; the Institute for Gender Studies, Ochanomizu ­Women’s ­University; Academia Sinica, Taiwan; the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Bologna; the Institute for Arts and ­Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; the Institute for Arts and the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study at Nanjing University; Jawaharlal Nehru University, Women’s Studies, GIAN; and the Luce Foundation.

Scholar comrades sustain me in ways difficult to put into words. Fabio Lanza read this manuscript twice, each time with exceptional critical patience and insight. Jing “CJ” Chen, Rebecca Karl, Anna Krylova, Tom Lamarre, Alida Metcalf, Rosalind Morris, and Kerry Ward graciously read parts. So many students have handled the data, and the collection proj­ect has gone on for so long, that at least two are tenured professors themselves. Special thanks to Professors Helen Schneider and Teresa Mares as well as certified public accountant Mengliang “Rosy” Zhang. While the following ­were never my students, I also thank Professors Kristy Leisle and Riki Thompson, and Brandy Parris, PhD, for advice, editorial support, and image ­handling. Over the years, research librarians, bibliographers, and library curators have played an enormous positive role in my life. My deepest debts are to Michael Zhenhua Meng, curator of the Asian Library at Yale University, who has worked on this proj­ect for de­cades. I have also benefited from the attention of University of Washington Asia librarian Shen Zhijia; Valentina de Monte of the Bibliothèque municipal de Lyon; Lin He, director of information pro­cessing, Shanghai Library; Anna Shparberg, Fondren Library at Rice University; archivists at the Club Cosmetics Archive in Osaka; and kind librarians at Duke Archives, National University of Singapore, Toyo Bunko, and Stanford University. I gratefully acknowledge the kindness of Nancy Hearst, Fairbank Center librarian at Harvard University, and Michael Meng in securing a copy of the rare Liushi fufu milan de sheng­huo chou’e de linghun. In the years it has taken me to shape t­ hese ideas, ­family members have died. I remember them h­ ere: my m ­ other, Alice Voorsanger Barlow; my husband, Donald Ming-­dah Lowe; and my sister-­in-­law, Adrienne Jampolis Lowe, one of Los Angeles’s first female advertising executives. The marriage of my parents-­in-­law, C. H. Ch’uan-­hua Gershom Lowe and Hsien-en Sharon Lowe, née Nieh, allowed me intimate insight into modern Chinese life in Shanghai before the Japa­nese occupation. Ruri Ito, Carol Roland-­Nawi, and Angela Zito have heard a lot about this book. So has James Paskowitz, m.d. Professor Chen Jing of Nanjing University, who came to Rice University as a Luce Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Chao Center for Asian Studies, has taken my old-­fashioned image collecting into a w ­ hole new dimension. The digital archive that she ­imagined, the Chinese Commercial Advertising Archive (https://­ccaa​ .­nju​.­edu​.­cn​/­html​/­index​.­html), is open to scholars, teachers, and readers. In Houston, Yasmine Ballantyne, Jane DiPaolo, Mary Kesterson, x 

• Acknowledgments

Jan Duncan, Morgan Moody, and Sergey Vasiliev have added spice and fun to my life. In Tokyo, Adachi Mariko, Vera Mackie, Sakamoto Hiroko, Barbara Sato, and the late Takemura Kazuko became valued associates. Friends at the University of Washington—­Andrea Gurvitz Arai, Davinder Bhowmik, Vince Rafael, Laurie Sears, and John Treat—­helped me make the introduction to this book less bewildering. In New York City, the endlessly creative Angela Zito is a source of intellectual plea­sure. East Coast comrades Rebecca Karl, Suzy Kim, Yukiko Koga, Tom Lamarre, and Aminda Smith are beloved fellow travelers. Listeners and respondents at universities where I have given the talks that preceded this book have helped me in ways that did not always seem apparent at the time but that helped me grow in unanticipated directions. This book has a rich prehistory. In 2004 Professor Ruri Ito and I cohosted the memorable “Modern Girl, Asia and Beyond: Global Capital, Colonial Modernities and Media Repre­sen­ta­tions” (http://­www​ .­igs​.­ocha​.­ac​.­jp​/­moga​/­index​.­html), a meeting of U.S.-­and Asia-­located modern-­girl scholars. At the University of Washington, I had cofounded the Modern Girl around the World Research Group (Madeline Dong, Uta Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Lynn Thomas, Elys Weinbaum), and in 2000–2001, when I met Ito at the Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu W ­ omen’s University, she and I cofounded a ­sister collective (Adachi Mariko, Ruri Ito, Kim Eunshil, Ko Ikujo, Muta Kazue, Sakamoto Hiroko, Barbara Sato, and Tachi Kaoru). The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008) focused on globalization, and Modan garu to shokuminchi taki kindai higashijia ni okeru teikoku shihon jenda (The Modern Girl, Colonial Modernity, and East Asia) (Iwanami shoten, 2010) raised questions of colonialism and imperialism. ­Under a Program in Global Sociology fellowship at Hitotsubashi University in 2010, Ito introduced me to Miho Matsumura, who supported my work on Club Cosmetics and the Morishita Jintan Corporation. Also, Ruri Ito helped me place 1,600 photo images of Tokyo, Kamakura, and Awa Kominato everyday life that my ­father, Claude A. Barlow, took in 1962–1963. Ken Wissoker’s editorial direction and encouragement improved the book. Reviewer 1 gave helpful directions ­after reading a remarkably nebulous first draft. Tracy Stober made sense out of the notes, Dr. Yizhong Gu checked translations and citations, Kimberly Miller gave me the best copyedit ever, and Professor Ping Zhu provided a second pair of eyes reading proofs. Editor Anita Grisales provided development adAcknowledgments  •  x i

vice, including pointing out places where readers with no background in Chinese history needed more information. I hope that together we have made this a more accessible read.

Parts of the following essays appear in altered form in this book. My grateful thanks to the copyright ­owners for allowing alteration and republication. “Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History,” positions: asia critique 20, no. 1 (Winter 2012). “Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, edited by the Modern Girl around the World Research Group (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). “Commercial Advertising Art in 1840s–1940s ‘China,’ ” in A Companion to Chinese Art, edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016). “Event, Abyss, Excess: The Event of ­Women in Chinese Commercial Advertisement, 1910s–1930s,” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 24, no. 2 (2013). “Gender,” in The Making of the ­Human Sciences in China: Historical and Conceptual Foundations, edited by Howard Chiang (Leiden: Brill, 2020). “History and Border,” Journal of ­Women’s History 18, no. 2 (2006). Review of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, mclc online, 2013. https://­u​.­osu​.­edu​/­mclc​/­book​-­reviews​ /­chinese​-­feminism​-­barlow​/­. “Wanting Some: Natu­ral Science, Social Science and Consumerism,” in ­Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, edited by Mechthild Leutner and Nikola Spakowski (Berlin: lit, 2005). “ ‘ What Is a Poem?’: The Event of ­Women and the Modern Girl as Prob­lems in Global or World History,” in Immanuel Wallerstein and the Prob­lem of the World: System, Scale, Culture, edited by David Palumbo-­Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). xii 

• Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Event

On April 10, 1967, the Red Guard Jinggangshan Regiment at Qinghua University staged a series of strug­gle sessions against Wang Guangmei (1921–2006), a high-­ranking Communist Party member and Chinese premier Liu Shaoqi’s wife. The trial sounded core themes in the ­Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (aka the Cultural Revolution), conventionally dated 1966 to 1976. In Wang’s case, Jiang Qing (1914–1991), a leading member of the Gang of Four directing the Chinese Cultural Revolution, authorized a Red Guard undergraduate faction u­ nder chemical engineering student Kuai Dafu’s (1945–) leadership to or­ga­nize the trial against Wang.1 In this book’s final chapter, I describe and analyze the “line error,” or crime charged, that Wang was pursuing a Khrushchevian, revisionist, anti-­Communist diplomacy. But at immediate stake is Wang’s singular offense, the characteristics that made her more than just another high-­ranking official who had “taken the cap­i­tal­ist road.” According to the students’ charge document, Wang had traveled to Indonesia on state business in 1963 and was photographed offering Sukarno a light for his cigarette. Also in the course of the trip, Wang had worn a hat made in Hong Kong, an allegedly provocative dress, a brooch, and a string of pearls that Jiang Qing, also ranked nomenklatura and Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife, had ordered her to not wear.2 At stake in the conflict, then, was w ­ hether Wang’s per­for­mance of Chinese state femininity had been adequate: once her antagonists successfully criminalized this

be­hav­ior, they set off what became a far-reaching crisis over the po­liti­cal truth of Chinese ­women. In the lopsided strug­gle between an ascendant Jiang Qing and an embattled Wang, the question facing revolutionary youth in the Mao po­liti­cal movement was how to install a true truth of ­women. Kuai prevailed in 1967. Wang gave a series of self-­criticisms and spent twelve years in prison.3 Jiang Qing was sentenced to death in 1981 for her criminal be­hav­ior, including the persecution of Wang. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, significant cohorts of Chinese men and ­women convulsively repudiated the truth of ­women that Jiang Qing’s group had sought to install po­liti­cally. And eleven years into her commuted sentence Jiang hung herself. Since an event is a po­liti­cally inspired action to install a newly discovered truth, what is at stake in the po­liti­cal event of ­women? In the late seventeenth ­century, a cohort of friends in Holland and E ­ ngland concluded that life involved eggs. Egg theory dominated speculative Eu­ro­pean material philosophy for 150 years while at the same time no one knew for sure what eggs did. Ovists and spermists debated w ­ hether sperm w ­ ere actually tiny l­ ittle eggs and the ovum a mere culture or medium or, contrarily, ­whether sperm’s vapors ­were stimulating latencies in eggs. Since no one (including Baruch Spinoza, active in this debate) knew how eggs created new individuals, egg discoveries ­were a nonevent. Mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759), entomologist Renè Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur (1683–1757), and precursor ge­ne­ ticist Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) each added building blocks; Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804–1881) and Theodor Schwann (1810–1882) demonstrated that life existed at the cellular level; and, fi­nally, Oscar Hertwig (1849–1922) became the first person to see an egg and a sperm create a zygote and to definitively show that the conceptus was alive. And still this did not constitute a po­liti­cal event. The event of ­women is the po­liti­cal determination that in ­human social existence ­women are men’s equivalent ­because physiological sexual reproduction is true. Rather than being always absent or latent or forgotten participants in historical events, po­liti­cal voluntarism has and continues to transform physiological truth about ­women into its own historical event: this is part of “in the event of ­women.” Another is that even ­today the biology of reproduction, ­human or chicken, is not fully understood; investigations always find more data to adjust what can be considered truth.4 But we know that out of the laboratory science of Darwin’s time, which enfolded seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century egg and sperm 2 

• Introduction

theory and practical experiments in nineteenth-­century industrial ­cattle breeding, the truth of sex surged into philosophical circles. Charles Darwin had correctly argued that huge numbers of life-­forms reproduce by fusing bits of spermatic material to egg material: activists made his insight po­liti­cally potent. So-­called social Darwinian sociologists and general phi­los­o­phers acted on this truth. Even as we move t­ oward extrauterine reproduction and the cyberneticization of humanity, altering nineteenth and twentieth-­century understanding, the truth of ­women’s contribution to h­ uman sexual reproduction cannot be rescinded or denied. Significant implications follow. First, t­ here is nothing Chinese or Eu­ro­pean about h­ uman physiology or for that m ­ atter the physiological truth that ­women are h­ umans: po­liti­cal actions taken on the basis of eighteenth-­to nineteenth-­century reproductive science are historically singular and contingent, obviously. Second, events are not discoveries; they are prolonged efforts to demonstrate a truth, in this case that w ­ omen are, just like men, procreative ­human beings, mammals with natu­ral rights, and that ­women are dif­fer­ent ­because in species life, organic vital ele­ments originating in dif­fer­ent organs, the testes and ovaries, are sine qua non for regenerative life. It turns out that Wang Guangmei and Jiang Qing’s 1967 conflict over ­women’s feminine per­for­mance is only one episode in a longer, unresolved po­liti­cal and historical event of ­women.5

Natu­r al and Social Facts Establishing how w ­ omen are the reproductive equivalent of men transformed truth. All over the educated world, ­women abruptly appeared at the center of national history. News about our mammal origins accompanied the commodity form, too, and tangible domestic commodities materialized the event of ­women u­ nder conditions of late nineteenth-­ century corporate imperialism. Branded soap and insecticide ads, rolled tobacco, neomedical elixirs, affordable automobiles, chemical and bean effluvia fertilizer, birth control and venereal disease potions, hormonal treatments, Kotex pads, chemical masculinity enhancers, romance-­ inducing body improvements, and so on all conveyed the new procreation story. So, while the truth of sexual reproduction is g­ oing to always be transitive, the event of ­women is a lavishly documentable, never fully completed po­liti­cal strug­gle to establish truth and social justice.

Introduction  •  3

Historians often define ­woman in relation to man. They draw on mea­ sures like sexual difference, psychic difference, sex-­coded l­abor, or role theory. For instance, a now-­everyday argument explains individual variety in terms of “gender difference.” The gender debate has bravely strug­ gled to fuse the natu­ral science of physiological difference to the social science of be­hav­ior and in so ­doing to capture the differences among ­women, including disparities like ethnicity, racial coding, class, sexual orientation, and desire. Gender is also, historically speaking, a way of reconfiguring colonial discourses, what economic imperialism revealed about h­ uman diversity, and this includes the distinctions—­women, men, and o­ thers—­drawn everywhere differently. Understanding ­women not as latent participants in events but an event as such focuses us on ­women’s recent origin story and helps peel away gender theory’s wobbly efforts to reconcile the natu­ral and the social. Installing evolutionary truth demanded attention and flexibility. This is easier to see analogically: if you get an infection in your toe and you soak it, cauterize it, keep it clean, and invite a shaman to pray over it, your toe usually heals. You do not need to know the etiology of infectious agents. Since 1890 modernists have developed germ theory to explain what is ­going on in your toe. By the 1920s antibiotics often cured the infection without the shaman. We still use shamans, but science has altered our worldly understanding of why shamans are helpful. What happens when we examine how transitive and profoundly disturbing discoveries change thinking and living? How does medicine, your toe healing ­because you have eaten a known active agent, transform your perception of your body? We know not only that antibiotics have cured tuberculosis but also that t­ here are now antibiotic-­resistant forms of tuberculosis. But the scientific imprimatur, even when the science becomes outdated or is proven untrue, changes historical subjects and our perception of our humanity. Imagine believing that according to the best and most scientific theories available in the w ­ hole world, w ­ omen naturally choose to mate with the best available males, just like other mammals? That only culture or tradition stands in the way of natu­ral female sexual desire and racial improvement? And what about the alleged truth that in their natu­ral state ­women have created the male to aid in h­ uman species evolution? In the Event of ­Women reconstructs moments when t­ hese novel modern concepts of sexuality and difference ­rose to the status of a truth. But the book’s argument considers a realization about historical universals in a 4 

• Introduction

place where truth claims are not usually sought. Knowledge, the indisputable truth of ­women in this case, concerns the world. In this book, that world is China. Arguments and evidence are located in Chinese modern treaty ports, and at the end of this book, t­ hese resolve in a paroxysm of Chinese revolutionary evental strug­gle over the truth of ­women. China is a place where ­people live and think and act. It need not always be a place where historians compare t­ hings b­ ecause difference is not always the most urgent question. Nonetheless, a historian must conjecture what is singular about this world—­not in relation to somewhere ­else, but, rather, asking, “What is singular about the event of ­women in China?” Singularities arise explic­itly and implicitly throughout this book. First is the role that revolutionary politics has played in the historical strug­gle over w ­ omen in China. Marxist philosophy and critical sociology not only played a distinctive role in strug­gles for power but prevailed ­after the ­People’s Republic of China became a sovereign state. In s­ imple chronological terms, 1920 through 2020 is an entire ­century of violent bloody insurrections; the vio­lence lasts a c­ entury and a half and is even more catastrophic if one begins with w ­ omen soldiers in the mid-­nineteenth-­century Taiping Revolution, a civil war costing approximately forty million ­people their lives. ­There may be similarities to the Chinese case elsewhere in the world, but the role played by w ­ omen in China’s revolutionary history is substantial. A second singularity is likely the language revolution. Literate Chinese elites played a significant role in the event of ­women. Not only did a g­ reat late-­dynastic language revolution upend conventional literary expression, but in the crushing effort to establish mass lit­er­a­ture, a language revolution disrupted elite mono­poly over high literacy. When the imperial examination system was abolished in 1905, modernist conceptual prob­lems and scientific and social scientific theories flooded into mass circulation. Literati educated ­under the old system argued that hybridization of literary expression had to occur or too many “untranslatables” would thwart Chinese efforts to understand physical science. Particularly objective social sciences would remain out of reach b­ ecause sophisticated Chinese writing always referred back to itself. This perception lies b­ ehind the well-­known flow of nouns or neologisms into modern Chinese, particularly out of Japa­nese. In the pro­cess, generic forms, including ­those associated with conventional (i.e., nonmodernist) female writers and poets, got savaged and kicked aside.6 As this book’s chapters on sociology and mimeses argue, the language revolution anchored a belief that written Introduction  •  5

texts in Chinese could represent real­ity, the real, of social life but only ­after the Chinese language adjusted the relation of written and spoken expressions. Scientific language reform and mobilization of the event of ­women into revolutionary goals are fundamental singularities characterizing Chinese conditions in the event of ­women. National differences and singularities in everyday life aside, my approach to writing the event of ­women modifies what historians mean when using the term context. The prevailing method supposes p­ eople live inside a context. Texts, what p­ eople write or draw, fit into a context like puzzle pieces fit into a larger image. In this view, historians adjust for bias—­a class bias or a national bias, for instance—­but texts are read in order to illustrate real class relations or real empirical conditions. This book assumes, on the contrary, that p­ eople act ­under given conditions beyond which, in most circumstances, nothing ­else is thinkable. In mundane times, we establish a world where we can live and explain our existence. E ­ very once in a while, however, a wager is thrown and a truth proposed that lies beyond ­these normative conditions. That is how an event is triggered. Th ­ ose who see or appreciate the new truth ­w ill assert it and argue out its implications, even fight other p­ eople, to determine how the new truth ­will be established. In the Event of ­Women presumes that t­ here is no privileged position where a text represents a context. Conditions are conditions. They remain inert. To explain how new t­ hings enter the world (the child in Eu­rope, the event of a global proletariat, a steam engine, a colonial bourgeoisie, extermination camps, the science of homo­sexuality, society as the sine qua non of ­human life, ­etc.), historians amass evidence and clarify conditions where ­these new truths became actable. When ­woman is an event, not a repre­sen­ta­tion or a per­ for­mance, ­there is no comparative axis, no other, but rather a voluntarist action to confirm a new truth. In the event of ­women, this new truth is that e­ very w ­ oman possesses natu­ral rights and an innate knowledge about sexual se­lection. When freed to express t­ hose inborn rights and to choose to procreate with the best available mate, w ­ omen perfect life itself and the social pro­cesses that accompany evolution.7 From the mid-­nineteenth through the early twenty-­f irst c­ entury, theorists, consumers, and readers in China de­cided that they lived, as all ­humans do, in a society and not in a cosmos or an empire. Society became the platform where they hammered out all the implications this new knowledge brought with it. Ontologies (what is Being) and epistemologies (the ways we know t­ hings) got tested. All prob­lems became social 6 

• Introduction

prob­lems. All be­hav­iors became social roles. The claims natu­ral sciences made about factual truth got hammered into theory and practice on the anvil of social science. Society gave access to what new intellectuals believed ­were previously unreachable yet universally incontestable truths under­lying cultural differences. Social structures, social prob­lems, social roles, social epistemology, and the vari­ous ontologies of social existence had the power to resituate educated Chinese p­ eople in New China, in the new world. Why a string of pearls is worth fighting over and why, indeed, it has a role to play in a history written fifty-­five years ­later are good questions. A social per­for­mance, a contest over what is real, unfolded on a social platform, on a planet accurately described in astrophysics, during the social evolutionary ascent of humanity, and in the larger strug­gle to figure out Chinese society’s place in the universe. Blasting out of the river of time and explaining a strug­gle over the first lady’s dress rests on far-­ flung conditions and h­ uman voluntarism, commitment, and someone’s passionate willingness to act on w ­ omen’s social and natu­ral truth. This book proposes that in the event of ­women, the female person—­woman or ­women—­became a pivot in modernist intellectual work. The shock of physiologically distinguished h­ uman sexual real­ity set off ingeniously creative theoretical proj­ects. The book analyzes some of them. But it also argues that “­women” is not a projection, an abstraction, a gender, a signifier, a flow, or a void. It is also not an effect of Western repre­sen­ta­tion or cultural imperialism. Nor is it some g­ reat reveal or preexisting condition, since projecting physiologically defined ­women backward in time cannot explain female’s or ­human’s historical experience.

The Event in the Event of ­Women Focusing history on events has advantages. It highlights the fact that ­people do t­ hings. W ­ hether p­ eople are acting in response to an apprehension that Christ has risen or in relation to having established that ­human ovaries contribute an egg to procreation, historiography of events presupposes action, or volition. Moreover, theories of event are neither structuralist nor poststructuralist, b­ ecause they rest on the assumption of historical presence rather than the vortex of repre­sen­ta­ tion. In Alain Badiou’s philosophy, the vortex supports naming, nomination, but the worlds’ presence means that ­human subjects are acting Introduction  •  7

inside their real conditions; they are not merely discursive subjects or subject to discourse. One need not embrace the ancient Greek theory that the universal is the real apprehended mathematically, or Badiou’s idiosyncratic point that Paul Cohen’s modern set theory explains how historical newness enters the world, to appreciate that history is material in the sense of leaving indelible marks. Events not only arise out of ­human acts but accrete. They even wait, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, for historians to wrench them up out of disremembered or buried materials.8 Who acts, what temporality animates accretions, what the relation of politics is to history, are acutely difficult ­matters. In a post-­Engelsian, post-­Foucauldian historiography of the event, ­there is no teleology, no evidence of epistemic rupture or temporal termination, only subjective action, latent novelty, and discoveries that are universalizable. Some theorists have argued that events should be understood using notions of emplotment or “discursive construction.” According to Hayden White, literary narrative emplots or colors or emotionally characterizes the transmission of past events. Since we cannot write history without using narratives, history in its written form must consist of novelistic typologies of emplotment. Historian-­philosopher Michel Foucault demonstrated why many historical t­ hings are in fact nonevents (prison reforms, for instance) b­ ecause t­ hese nonevents do not change t­ hings (they actually extend the existing power of carceral disciplinary logic, for instance); modernity changes l­ ittle except to provide even more punitive punishments such as the panopticon, surveillance society, and rationality. Like White, Foucault was relatively disinterested in philosophizing events, but unlike White he did not take the event for granted. Eventalization (a Foucauldian neologism) means the historian intervenes in a structuralist historical account to highlight or demonstrate a relative discontinuity, an “epistemic shift” or a rupture, in the other­wise expected. As Arianna Bove has noted, Foucault used Annales school historiography to anchor his own historico-­philosophical concerns and to initiate ways of extracting singularities or in his language “eventalizing” topics like biopower, sexuality, and discipline. This gave him a way to claim that an epistemic shift had taken place even in the absence of structural change in the historical longue durée.9 Gilles Deleuze, Badiou’s favorite antagonist, in contrast, held (contra Foucault) that events originate in speech or illocutionary acts. Rooted in the Greek Stoics’ axiom of the power of propositions, as cited in Patton, Deleuze held that events “actualize par­tic­u­lar events in the social 8 

• Introduction

field”; this is why “politics frequently takes the form of strug­gle over the appropriate description of events.”10 The notion that illocutionary acts are a foundation for historical truth is widespread. Deleuze’s distinction between the ideal (illocutionary) event and an actualized event is the prob­lem ­here. Once the claim shifts from philosophical questions to historical truth, Deleuze’s idealist periodization of historical time is unhelpful and anyway not sustainable.11 Nonetheless, given per­sis­tent low-­key debates over historiography and historical method, it is not surprising that some China and India historians consider Foucauldian eventality to be a heuristic and argue, in one famous example, that modern Chinese historiography “dispersed” and denigrated the past and therefore denied the real. A good historian’s job, this argument went, is to rescue real, that is native, history from something called the nation and to redeem events, developing a more sympathetic reading rooted in a traditional or indigenous cultural context.12 Badiou’s key value to the event debate is po­liti­cal, and that is the primary reason I agonistically contest him, rather than engaging other theorists of the event. This study seeks to grasp how new t­ hings occur. In the event of ­women, the stakes are revolutionary: ­women’s recently discovered bioge­ne­tic, hormonal body appears historically as a newly realized social temporality. One implication is that modern w ­ omen from the outset have been a set of commands to recognize and authorize a subject’s integral station and to evaluate her acts as dif­fer­ent from yet (in the ­future) equal to ­those of men. Given ­these practical claims to modern standing, to be a co-­modernist in a modern society, w ­ omen categorically ­will be “victims of oppression” who “declare” and are “part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed.”13 In so­cio­log­i­cal rationality, w ­ omen’s natu­ral rights w ­ ill be v­ iolated even as they are installed since inherent rights are latent, not necessarily manifest: natu­ral rights do not need to be manifest in order to exist. In this scheme newness arrives in the world ­because subjects laying claim, or fidelity in his philosophical language, to the new w ­ ill, slightly adjusting Badiou’s position, open a way of writing history, acknowledging that w ­ omen and men who share the belief that ­women are full natu­ral or physiological subjects ­will continue presenting themselves. Technically, an event, in Badiou’s philosophy, is something that happens within a set of possibilities, when a latency or so-­called ultra-­one is noticed; notation changes how that given set is understood. But events are not pos­si­ble in the absence of a subject that recognizes and militates Introduction  •  9

(i.e., sets into motion a generic procedure) for that newly configured, formerly latent entity. When significant ­things are recognized, and the ­thing gets acted on, it is pos­si­ble that actors rupture an older order on the bases of new truths. ­Woman appears, a native to a situation, and the event’s adherents recognize w ­ oman’s claims to personhood. While a subject, the biological female h­ uman is an ele­ment arising out of unfathomably complex historical conditions, once it is discerned or declared or noticed, declaration makes the subject an immanently discovered truth.14 The conditions under­lying the event of ­women in China as laid out in this book’s chapters are precisely that set of possibilities, just as the figures stepping forward to iterate over and over the qualities and capacities of ­women demonstrate the truth of the initial assertion.

­ ere are, nonetheless, two hesitations about Badiou’s philosophy of the Th event. The first is its ambiguous or even slippery relation to the world, to history not just of politics but of philosophical, artistic, affective, scientific thought and action. Many critics have remarked on this, but Alenka Zupančič said it best when she noted that in fact for Badiou, “­there is [an implicit] fifth condition of philosophy” beyond art, mathe­matics, love, and politics, which is that philosophy has to pull itself away from the immediate grip of its own conditions, while nevertheless remaining u­ nder the effect of ­these conditions.15 Zupančič is noting a useful paradox in Badiou, which is that to be philosophical (i.e., generic), philosophy must pull away from precisely the worldly conditions that it seeks to interpret, conditions that can be neither fully denied nor fully determined yet that announce philosophy’s own arrival onto the scene. The other basic reservation concerns how Badiou restricts the relation of truth and worldly circumstance to what he calls sequence. This, as many critics note, impoverishes history and runs the risk that a great-­man po­liti­cal history is reinstalled. In a sleight of hand, in other words, po­liti­cal sequence comes to substitute for history as such, which allows the Badiou scholar to engage in what historians would recognize to be history writing, while at the same time disavowing the relation of the po­liti­cal sequence to the conditions for thought that have played a role in revolutionary transformation. This definitively marks Badiou’s distance from the Marxian tradition.16 In the Event of ­Women exploits ­these ambiguities in Badiou’s philosophy of event.17 It goes directly to what Zupančič calls the fifth condition 10 

• Introduction

of philosophy in order to divulge a past space of thinking and po­liti­cal action and to extend that past space into our con­temporary moment. Technically this involves weighing not philosophy but thinking, that is, local debates in Chinese treaty-­port scholarly communities, side by side with the physical conditions where ­these communities worked and the economic and po­liti­cal pro­cesses restructuring the social field of life. Reconstructing a century-­old world of conditions for thinking and the content of thinking is an unapologetically historical task. So is archiving and analyzing vernacular expression of advanced modernism in modernity’s a­ ctual physical environment, the “grip” or restrictions of philosophy’s conditions. Juxtaposing materials opens to visibility spaces where ­people ­were thinking and engaging in po­liti­cal action. An archive of Chinese commercial advertising images dating from the late nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth ­century, for instance, illuminates contemporaneous theoretical work aimed at strategizing advertising methods and selling science in ­those de­cades; lays out histories of corporations that extended finance capital into Chinese emergent commodity markets, along with their commodity-­distribution plans; raises to the horizon of history the output of creative intellectuals, literary figures, translators, critics, social science theorists, commentators, and scholars who established the there­ness of society and its facticity and who eventually institutionalized a log­os of sociology and the core rationality of the social sciences. In a consequently frenzied world, translating and interpreting calques or neologisms accompanied sociology’s advance into a physical environment that would overnight become saturated with social logics and motivated by what Tong Lam calls a new “passion for facts.”18 In addition to advertising arts, industry, statist social surveys, and the dynamic world of imaginative vernacular sociology, In the Event of ­Women also considers the tense relation of what Asia historians consider an impor­tant economic regime, that of international finance capital, to the log­os of social theory.19 New conditions for thinking and the modernist philosophies that thinkers developed revolved around changing economic regimes; po­liti­cal contradictions; logical impasses; theories of society, femininity, humanity, and sexuality; the strug­gle to evaluate how scientific truths worked in liberated social relationships; and, most centrally, the appearance of a revolutionary subject, ­women, in society. This study is thus neither philosophy nor a helpful subsidiary effort to provide Badiou’s philosophy with a “ground.” Zupančič’s assertion, coming as it does from Badiou’s own camp of psychoanalytic phi­los­o­phers, Introduction  •  1 1

suggests that Badiou’s ahistorical theory of the event inhabits the double bind described in the following.20 Zupančič declines Badiou’s injunction against history in a way long familiar in Lacanian feminist positions, which, while psychoanalytic, parts ways from Badiou’s and Lacan’s austere, authoritarian politics and judgmental prescriptions against castrated subjects.21 Demanding that the haughty Badiou “venture into the dense thickets of real history, into the social and historical determination of events,” Daniel Bensaïd also relentlessly noted the contradictory or magical way that Badiou claims on the one hand that “­there can be no transcendental truth, only truths in situation and in relation,” while on the other hand adamantly refusing to consider that truths are in fact deduced from premises. “Detached from its historical conditions,” Bensaïd wrote in apparent revulsion, the “pure diamond of truth, the event, just like the notion of the absolutely aleatory encounter in the late Althusser, is akin to a miracle. . . . ​[A] politics without politics is akin to a negative theology.” 22 Bensaïd dislodged the event from Badiou’s philosophical moorings in the name of history, as Zupančič had in a less manifest or gross fashion. And yet Badiou remains a better theorist of event than disciplinary historians like Foucault or Joan Scott b­ ecause Badiou insists that an event is never a piece of the banal flow of vegetative life. Unlike Foucault, who simply left sexual difference out of his theory of sexuality, Badiou cleanly admits into his schema the scandal of the impossibility of a psychoanalytic female subject. This separates him from Scott’s psychodynamic fiction of a gender, in which she claims to recognize the female subject while at the same time disavowing it. The strength of the Badiou proposal, therefore, is that he restricts the notion to phenomena that are subjective, unpre­ce­dented, and broadly or irrevocably transformative. To the degree that philosophy can never fully extricate its mechanisms from the conditions that support their rationality, Badiou initiates a vision of event that can in fact accommodate the event of ­women, the revolutionary appearance of a female, libidinous, mammal, ­human subject on the historical horizon. A history of the event of ­women distinguishes eventality from event and, the most popu­lar clichéd meme of all, the epistemic event. Fi­nally, it may help establish what is pos­si­ble “in the event of ­women” to reposition feminist critique historically, a sound strategic weapon with a cogent log­os of its own. Yan Fu, Kawakami Hajime, Shusui (Kotoku Denjiro), Qu Qiubai, Chen Han-­seng, Li Da, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Nicolai Bukharin, 12 

• Introduction

Vladimir Lenin, Rudolf Hilferding, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, Lester Frank Ward, and many other Chinese Enlightenment sources established definitive logics, authoritatively proclaiming that ­humans live in society and are social animals and that society is or­ga­nized in developmental stages. In enclaves like Shanghai, they wrote about uneven social pro­gress in cap­i­tal­ist development and about how to situate oneself in the world. Historically, then, how true are their “Chinese” theories; w ­ ere t­ hese p­ eople right? Usually, confronted with such a question, historians respond that all ideas are divisible back into their contexts and that ideas make sense only contextually, which is to say that history cannot be true or untrue, ­because it is always a version of something alleged to be truer or even unknowably true. The cliché that truth is contextual does not resolve prob­lems inherent in the question of ­whether Chinese social theory had truly diagnosed its own socio-­ economic conditions. Early twentieth-­century Chinese intellectuals worked at the edge of the discernible. Further, the truths established a ­century ago are still considered true, for the most part. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau, this study finds correlations everywhere. One of the means by which credence is established or by which p­ eople show in their activities and their protestations that society exists, that ­women are subjects, and so on is by situating and recognizing how everyday life is defined so­cio­log­ i­cally. The conditions of thought are found in what Johanna Drucker insists is the material communication of ideas in graphic form.23 “The task of making knowledge vis­i­ble,” she writes, “does not depend on an assumption that images represent ­things in the world. Graphics make and construct knowledge in a direct and primary way.”24 When I understand commercial ephemera as “arguments made in graphical form” and take ­these graphical arguments to be an underused archive, advertisement images suddenly become surprisingly philosophically and so­cio­log­i­cally useful. So historical visibility in the form, for instance, of a toothpaste advertising image is not a meta­phor or a repre­sen­ta­tion; it is a graph of the real. Cartoon images like the light-­bulb ­woman are meaningful ­because they are, among other ­factors, a pictorial version of ideas. A reason to write the history of the Chinese advertising industry is that ads transformed the landscape; inside new media and outside, in the street, on the trolley, on the building tops, cartoon and photo images of social life surrounded and reconfirmed the newness of the new society. Graphesis raises questions about pre­ce­dent and about how meaning changes, since Introduction  •  1 3

graphic artists also draw on past and pre­sent to imagine the ­future, just as arguments based in literacy do. Coded into l­ ittle commercial cartoons and large billboards, however much pre­ce­dent is in play, are the same questions intellectual historians, militants, and engaged critics confronted: what is modern, how past is the past, what ghosts haunt colonial modernity that might undermine the revolutionary f­ uture, how is newness recognizable and what w ­ ill it take to expand it, what guarantees the new? Writing in the event of ­women peels away the gender dilemma and places ­women in the same modern historical framework as the proletariat, the White, the national. In the world of history, nothing is forever, but it is material, which is why the Chinese bourgeoisie or aspirational ­middle class strug­gled over the truth of ­women u­ nder specific conditions laid out ­here: imperialism, commercial capitalism, commodity culture, nationalism and anti-­imperialism, natu­ral rights claims, social science theory, and so on. In the historical event of ­women, the ­woman is a ­thing. That is why in the discussion of ­women’s modern history, ­there is a beginning, an event, a history, and no g­ oing back. In the Event of ­Women predicates conditions of thought inextricable from thought’s content, and willed actions taken in the moment of a perceived historical now. Conditions, thoughts, and actions are vis­i­ble and open to discovery and analy­sis, no ­matter where on the globe historical action was taken. The question of the relation of the event of ­women to feminist strug­gles for justice remains open.

­ ere are six tightly linked chapters in this argument. Chapter 1, “ConTh ditions of Thinking,” lays out the economic upheaval that ushered in circumstances making an event of ­women thinkable. Chinese modern social theory starting in the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury repeatedly and with increasing urgency declared that w ­ oman is a finite, localized organism, a something, a living categorical, a someone specific. Pretty much every­one agreed on the alleged fact that ­women’s eugenic contribution accelerated when they bought and used new industrially made commodities. Therefore, the chapter focuses on Andersen, Meyer & Com­pany (amco); Morishita Jintan; British American Tobacco Com­pany (bat); Nanyang ­Brothers Tobacco Com­pany; and Brunner Mond and Co. also known, ­after 1926, as Imperial Chemical Industries or ICI. It i­ntroduces the 14 

• Introduction

late nineteenth-­century international firm, or l­ imited liability com­pany (llc), and shows how the llc’s financialization of capital in Chinese treaty ports and its strategic, fantastic market-­building strategies worked. As Wen-­hsin Yeh pointed out years ago, becoming modern poses a historical prob­lem.25 One means of approaching the modernity question is to scrutinize industrially produced commodities, particularly branded ones. The conditions for desiring and acquiring industrially produced commodities are pre­sent in the financialized, large-­scale, imperialist corporations, the technological revolution in printing, and the social science of advertising. All of ­these are vis­i­ble in the lovely image of a Shanghai female advertising agent at the center of a large ge electric bulb (see figure 1.1). This image—­a conventional, homely bit of ephemera—­encodes corporate governance, “the firm,” banking and investment strategies, colonial law in Chinese treaty ports (established through a system of unequal treaties), l­ egal and corporate institutions, economic theories, and efforts to control property rights over corporate, branded commodities and electricity itself. Like most of the book’s chapters, this one generalizes from massive publication proj­ects including newspapers, journals of opinion, and corporate histories. Chapter 2, “Foundational Chinese Sociology,” analyzes how a leading so­cio­log­i­cal stream developed the truth of sexual difference in social life. Sociology found­ers Qu Qiubai and Li Da both took the truth of ­women to be a given. Major figures interpreting Eu­ro­pean philosophy and Bolshevik Marxism, ­these two sociologists fused modes of production, relations of production, and social evolution to the biology of ­human reproduction. ­Because they began from the assumption that social and biological evolution are inextricably entwined and that ­labor had to have evolved in a bodily or reproductive sense, they concurred that primitive society had been matriarchal. And in Li Da’s case, that biological humanity originated in female form and only gradually, ­under conditions of natu­ral se­lection, produced a male capable of inseminating a female partner. Recognizing that science and sexual sciences are truthful caused Qu Qiubai and his peers to reconsider how language itself communicates truth. Particularly Qu but also most May Fourth intellectuals and social scientists came to advocate a mimetic Chinese. Mimesis or repre­sen­ta­tionalism is the epistemological prob­lem lying at the bottom of arguments for vernacular language reform. The chapter opens vernacular language reform contextually in this regard: language had to support w ­ omen’s truth to be considered truthful accounting, a pre­sen­ta­tion of the real. Introduction  •  1 5

Chapter 3, “Vernacular Sociology,” refers to an incompatible mix of natu­ral science, social science, and theories of literary mimesis that constituted Chinese cosmopolitan opinion. Physiological ­women’s prominent role in evolutionary theory has meant that natu­ral and social science are difficult to disaggregate in modern thinking no ­matter where on the planet sociology and biology appear. Vernacular sociology fuses social evolution with commodity distribution. That is its first special characteristic. Chinese Marxist sociology proposes that procreation and ­labor power are tightly wound together, so that changes in evolutionary biology are intertwined with how ­labor power supports specific kinds of social relations like the primal horde, the matriarchy, feudal patriarchy, and so on. In vernacular so­cio­log­ic­ al theory, the motor for change is usually instinct. In this set of beliefs, h­ umans are animals, and animals have instincts, so social relations must be the effect of our instinctive needs and actions. The result is often eugenic history. A civilizational form of history, writing about the strug­gle of the fittest resolves in a triumphant announcement about eugenically superior stocks. Humanity can do this ­because, on the one hand, we are sexually differentiated, like all other mammals, and, on the other, we are wholly unlike other animals b­ ecause as we evolve we change our habitat. Unlike bees or ants, we can humanly engineer prostheses to improve our social life. Chapter 4, “The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera,” delineates Chinese commercial ephemera generically and links them to how a local ad industry sponsored modern knowledge. The knowledge embedded in ephemera is real. It remains true and has not yet been surpassed or debunked. We are evolutionary biological animals. Acknowledging that some theories are incontestably true helps clarify why history cannot just be discourse or a narrative repre­sen­ta­tion of differing opinions. But it also helps explain why wrenching out old ephemera clarifies historical norms and weakens Badiou’s insupportable notion that decisive po­ liti­cal sequences, rare and miraculous, are historical, while other given conditions for thinking philosophy (ephemera, waste, excrement, trivia, feminism) are historicist rubbish. It also collapses a gap separating historians and our modernist subjects. He-­Yin Zhen, Qu Qiubai, Li Da, Yan Fu, Ariga Nagao, and Jiang Qing w ­ ere not discursive subjects. Their declarative statements fortified truths that ­were and remain verifiable, that evolution explains h­ uman species-­being, w ­ omen are h­ uman, and so on. We continue to strug­gle with what our physiology means in

16 

• Introduction

relation to our collectivities and solidarities, even in highly philosophical proj­ects like Lacanian psychoanalysis. Chapter 5, “Nakedness and Interiority,” shows psychodynamic theories marking out a modern interiority for new ­women. This chapter proposes that embedded, latent Freudian psy­chol­ogy and eugenic theory saturated mass culture and set the terms of a historical unconscious that was popularly expressed in commercial art and ad images. Vernacular sociology set a low bar and pop­ul­ ar­ized instinct theory. Voiced explic­itly in the speculative work of eugenic sociologist Pan Guangdan, developed over an ongoing strug­gle to distinguish art from pornographic advertising images, a consensus position arose that Chinese w ­ omen w ­ ere narcissistic. It is not completely clear why an oceanic tide of mirror-­gazing girl icons swept Shanghai advertising campaigns in par­tic­u­lar. But it certainly fortified arguments being made in con­temporary social science circles about the ontological being of ­women. Freudian psychoanalysis emerged into Chinese translation around the same time that the Eu­ro­ pean nude also made its public appearance. And while the advertising girl image is generic, its presence indicates anatomical and physiological models of female desire. Girl-­centered commercial ephemera and theories of female centrality established the sticky, complex relation of advertising graphesis in commercial ephemera and vernacular sociology at elite and plebian levels.26 As chapters 2 and 4 suggest, the glamor of commodity advertising saturated the truth of ­women. Almost by default ­women became an “other other,” not just of bioman but in advertising other scenes of use value, attached to the commodity form itself. Chapter 6, “Wang Guangmei’s Qipao,” lays out in hyperbolic detail the po­liti­cal conflict between Wang Guangmei and Jiang Qing mentioned ­earlier in this chapter. While this strug­gle was an explicit po­liti­cal ­battle pitting one vision of the truth of ­women against another, it was not a disagreement over the sexed body. Rather, the brutal conflict involved a hideous symptomatic conflict over what social real­ity an evolutionary female subject o­ ught to live to be true to itself, or herself. Second, it proposes that a strug­gle session among Wang and Jiang and Red Guard factions in Beijing in 1967 can help explain why it is not pos­si­ble to write modern Chinese history without recognizing the event of ­women.

Introduction  •  1 7

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Chapter One

Conditions of Thinking

In the amco-­General Electric (ge) advertisement in figure 1.1, a w ­ oman sits in a light bulb–­shaped balloon. ­Here amco is the trade and brand name of Andersen, Meyer & Com­pany, L ­ imited, of China, a l­ imited liability com­pany (llc) formed in 1906 to sell “packages” to treaty port–­ based corporations and Chinese power holders: provincial warlord juntas, nationalist parties, Chinese companies, city governments, and so on. The product line of amco included industrial machines and accounting technologies, commercial investment packages, banking ser­vices, big turbines, and industrial chemicals, as well as lifestyle products like bulbs, ­table fans, light fixtures, flashlights, and so on. An llc is a l­ egal fiction limiting individual liability to the amount invested and making the fictive firm responsible for the rest. The firm owns debt; the partners take the profits and pay tax only on what their investment yielded. U ­ nder the unequal treaty system, beginning in 1842 when China lost the First Opium War, llcs like amco proliferated, suggesting that the llc form may have been corporate imperialism’s sine qua non. The girl in the ge bulb ad, a sophisticated, generic example of 1920s and 1930s Chinese commercial art, is drawing her own image in an endless mise en abyme. Trite, fragmentary, partial, ephemeral, and snatched out of oblivion, it encodes real conditions, just not in a totalizing or narrative account. Still, commercial ephemera alert historians to how advertising naturalized an infrastructural revolution underway in the colonial world.1

1.1  ​General Electric bulb

girl at advertising desk. Dongfang zazhi 19, no. 1 (January 10, 1922).

Advertising, an industrial proj­e ct, saturated treaty ports more ­effectively than commodified objects themselves. In this chapter and chapter 4, we see brokers and commercial advertising agencies subsidizing the mass media’s production costs as they made profits. De­cade ­after de­cade, the newspapers, mosquito press, high-­and lowbrow journals, and even academic publications rented out ad space and, beginning in the 1920s, leased urban and suburban outdoor facilities, too. Ads appeared on billboards, trolleys, department-­store win­dows, stalls, walls, skyscrapers, train stations, and showrooms; brand advertising images inundated suburban and urban environments (figures 1.2–1.7).2 Ad images contribute surplus information in ways no other evidence can b­ ecause they so publicly communicate the shock of the new. The amco-­ge bulb ad pre­sents a charming visual image to sell a commodity, but it also defines the scientifically produced commodity and urges ­people to “become consumers,” to buy products with “amco” or “ge” or “bat” (British American Tobacco) on them, rather than local objects or some 20 

• Chapter One

1.2  ​Nanjing Road in Shang-

hai, 1930. 1.3  ​Rickshaw stand at the

Beijing railroad station, 1930. 1.4  ​Moving-­board advertis-

ing in the French Concession, Shanghai, ca. 1920. 1.5  ​Studebaker brand

showroom and gas pump, 1931.

1.6  ​ bat cigarette billboard

in the suburbs. 1.7  ​Coca-­Cola ad and

Chinese soldiers resisting Japa­nese attack, 1937.

other competitor’s good. Repetitive, fetishized, banal, and routinized, ad images visually proclaim and engrain into daily life an image in the now of industrial commodity life. Everywhere, yet negligibly impor­tant, ad images colored Chinese “semicolonial, semifeudal” modernity, where conditions for thinking ­were u­ nder construction, architecturally, but also as the commodity form itself infiltrated the environment. Commercial ephemera reiterated recognizability, legibility, and intelligibility and smudged themselves into the world, just as phi­los­o­phers began to anticipate new ­futures. Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1941), V. I. Lenin (1870– 1924), Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), and He-­Yin Zhen (1884–­ca. 1919) speculated around the edge of the coming era. 22 

• Chapter One

Generic Ads, Business Models, and the LLC The female figure at the drawing board is an advertising agent, in the mise en abyme of an advertising agent drawing herself. Her natu­ral, unbound feet correlate with her productive ­labor contribution in an integrated, professional workforce. To ensure that the viewer does not overlook the relation between enlightened ­women and electrification, the artist has drawn blazes of light emanating out of the bulb into the universe. At top the legend reads “trademark.” Beneath it are the universally recognizable brand or legend “ge” and “Edison Electric bulbs.” ­Running horizontally along the side is the jingle or slogan “Brilliant, Durable, and Eco­nom­ ical. E ­ very Electric Shop Sells It.” At the bottom of the image is the double triangular logo spelling out amco, l460, to identify which cell of a long campaign this cartoon image is, and the Chinese name for amco, Shenchang yanghang, within a phrase that means “Chinese-­managed” or “management com­pany.” “Please mention the Eastern Miscellany”; this coupon enabled consumers to get a discount and retailers to feed back social science data to their suppliers/distributors. Ads for amco-­ge frequently associated images of light with their product, and they put advertising images in highbrow journals to further enlighten readers. While amco ads did not, other ads offered ­free samples in exchange for demographic information. The Cutex hand-­care campaign used both a numbered story arc and a coupon to reach potential consumers in highbrow journals like Ladies’ Journal and Funü zazhi (figure 1.8), and so did the heavi­ly flogged Pond’s knockoff cream Pond’s Extract Cream (figure 1.9). Vilhelm Meyer built amco using a model called “trade” that emerged when the ­great powers formalized the right to sell branded opium for mass consumption in Chinese treaty ports. U ­ nder the Nanjing Treaty of 1842, the British Jardine, Matheson & Com­pany; David Sassoon and Com­pany; and Harrison, King, and Irwin Com­pany could import capital and commodities like opium, tobacco, and infrastructure and export Chinese tea and silver. U.S., Japa­nese, and French trading companies joined what became a captive commerce in a nominally national economy that had l­ ittle capacity to regulate its own trade, tariffs, or banking. Then the United States surged capital into the situation, allowing Standard Oil, Getz ­Brothers and Com­pany, Connell Bros and Com­pany, and l­ittle players like amco to expand their corporate imperialist footprint. Huge operations like British American Tobacco (bat) began creating markets for rolled cigarettes, but all transnational llcs sold machine-­produced Conditions of Thinking  •  2 3

1.8  ​Cutex hand-­care ad with coupon. Funü

zazhi, November 1924. 1.9  ​Colgate Ribbon Dental Cream with

coupon. Dagongbao 84, no. 478 (June 7, 1928). 1.10  ​ amco ad touting its economy of

operation. Millard’s Review, March 20, 1920.

commodities and advertised their products to promote sales. So beyond assembly lines, steam-­powered machines, and reinforced-­concrete-­and-­ steel factory architecture, amco pop­u­lar­ized the industrially produced commodity. From the individual ­house­hold to local counties or cities, in English-­and Chinese-­language media, as t­ hese examples of ads for “installation warrantee,” nationwide access to machinery, building materials, insurance, and Shanghai’s treaty port glamor illustrate, what­ever you could afford, amco had a package for you.3 “Trade” required integrated financing and large influxes of finance capital. Peng Changxin has investigated amco’s innovative business history, and more remains to be learned, but amco was one of many traders that became a full-­service engineering, architectural construction, and maintenance com­pany.4 In 1931, in the com­pany’s corporate history for its twenty-­fifth anniversary, “His Excellency H. H. Kung, Minister of Industries of the National Government of China,” provided a note of appreciation about amco’s help with “extensive industrial development which has taken place in China” and anticipated continued cooperation in “our efforts at reconstruction.” Minister Kung Hsiang-­hsi’s enlisting the com­pany in the “industrial awakening of China” was realistic, given Vilhelm Meyer’s experience. ­After spending four years at the East Asiatic Com­pany and Russo-­Asiatic Bank, collaborating in building the modern Chinese banking and lending pro­cess, Meyer, who believed that “foreign trade was financed by foreign banks [­because few Chinese banks] ­were interested in financing foreign businesses,” drew on his commercial networks.5 His com­pany, amco, financed U.S. companies seeking to sell in the treaty ports and enabled Meyer to land his first engineering contract in 1908, building Mukden Electric Light Works, a power plant in Japanese-­dominated Dongbei, or Manchuria.6 Before 1917, amco and ge had played no role in the Chinese treaty-­ port economy.7 According to Emile Garke, that was ­b ecause each nation-­directed, corporate imperialist proj­ect chose to electrify its own extraterritorial real estate.8 The Compagnie Française de Tramways et d’Eclairage Electrique de Shanghai handled the Shanghai French concessions at least as late as 1917, and the British Hong Kong Tramway Com­ pany, ­Limited, served Hong Kong.9 ­After 1919, electricity financing shifted away from direct investment. That may be why in the early 1920s amco began taking on more; working directly with Gerard Swope (1872–1957), the ceo who ushered ge into consumer-­credit schemes and domestic-­ commodity sales, Meyer began advertising ge domestic products and Conditions of Thinking  •  2 5

1.11  ​ amco commodity map spanning the nation. Dongfang zazhi 17, no. 22 (November 25, 1920). 1.12  ​ amco ad for building products. Dongfang zazhi 20, no. 11 (January 10, 1923). 1.13  ​ amco ad for industrial factory materials. Dongfang zazhi 12, no. 8 (April 25, 1923). 1.14  ​ amco ad for mechanical engineering import insurance. Dongfang zazhi 19, no. 23 (Decem-

ber 10, 1922).

1.15  ​ amco ad for factory machines. Dongfang

zazhi 19, no. 19 (October 10, 1922). 1.16  ​ amco ad for York brand machines. Dong-

fang zazhi 19, no. 23 (April 25, 1924).

1.17  ​ amco ad for machine-

generated hydroelectricity. Dongfang zazhi 19, no. 15 (August 10, 1922). 1.18  ​ amco ad for an Arcola

brand radiator. Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 22 (November 25, 1921).

1.19  ​ amco ad for Certain-­

teed ­house paint. Dongfang zazhi 19, no. 17 (September 10, 1922).

general ser­v ices in Chinese electrification proj­ects.10 Eventually amco conducted large-­scale trade in “total packages.” ­These included a feasibility review, scouting for location, financing, architectural design, engineering, installation, and fine-­tuning of fixed capital, such as condensers at power plants. Any government could buy amco road-­construction packages, for instance, to engineer vehicle-­friendly streets, using earth rollers, tractors, caterpillar equipment, and “wagon equipment.” By 1931 amco offered air, ­water, telegraph, telephone, and radio-­communication technology and resembled a “prewar zaibatsu,” a vertical entity with affiliated holding companies, interlocking directorships (e.g., with ge), overlapping stockholders, and financial power to draw commercial bank credit.11A naive assumption that categorical markets preexisted branded commodities or are naturally occurring spaces where p­ eople gather to extract profit is not adequate or historical—­nor as in­ter­est­ing as what

28 

• Chapter One

actually happened.12 Chu-­yuan Cheng’s history of Standard Oil Com­pany of New York (socony) shows how marketization actually worked. The com­pany de­cided to open kerosene markets b­ ecause they wanted to extract microsurplus out of poor communities and kerosene was efficient and cheap. No fuel market existed ­because the commodity had not previously been available (­people used grain oil for light), but socony strategists aimed at a low return. Once the global economy shifted, however, and kerosene prices became unaffordable for villa­gers, socony began importing automobile fuel, again to build a market that had never existed before.13 Cheng emphasizes that ­after its first market-­building effort paid off, socony sank financial capital into what it correctly gambled would become a lucrative auto ­industry. Thus, socony and amco incrementally financialized using what Mira Wilkins and her collaborators William J. Hausman and Peter Hertner call international finance and theorists Hilferding and Lenin called financial capital.14 Financial capital flooded newly emerging commerce—­this is what colonial modernity is—to naturalize an infrastructural revolution. When Kung, a Chinese official, and an individual known as I. Andersen, a U.S.-­based finance broker, agreed to use amco-­packaged ge generators to develop the nation, the evidence actually shows two parties, one the spokesman for a fragile state and the other a middleman selling and maintaining large-­scale corporate imperialist hardware, installing and stabilizing uneven development. Their strategy comes to life in everyday environments, in commercial graphesis like that shown in figures 1.20–1.23 and featuring socony. The logic is impor­tant. Initially, socony had gas but few markets in Chinese treaty ports for autos or auto-­related ser­vices (figures 1.24 and 1.25). Even drayage or short-­distance trucking requires paved roads that, in turn, entail significant changes in financial rationality, investment, and informational advertising media. The com­pany could pivot and resituate its market-­building credit operations and financial-­package operations ­because, like other llcs featured in this chapter, it thrived in conditions where extraterritorial international business law, tariff manipulation, and unequal trade treaties ­were held in place by a succession of fragile Chinese states. More bluntly put, Chinese governments protected foreign direct investment. They guaranteed commercial firms and businesses the l­egal right to sell. Laws also granted exclusive brand copyrights. Particularly the latter empowered economic entities, from the new advertising industry to

Conditions of Thinking  •  2 9

1.20  ​ socony brand established. Dongfang zazhi 22, no. 1 (January 10, 1925). 1.21  ​ socony ad claiming that kerosene helps humanity evolve. Dongfang zazhi 22, no. 1 (March 10,

1924). 1.22  ​ socony candles and female enlightenment. Dongfang zazhi 24, no. 1 (January 10, 1927). 1.23  ​Ad for socony auto gas. Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 8 (April 25, 1921).

1.24  ​ socony ser­vice sta-

tion at Rotary Fair, Tianjin, 1930. MADspace #35191. 1.25  ​ socony motor gaso-

line truck, 1931. MADspace #35024.

purveyors of goods and ser­vices, to manufacture and distribute identifiable small and large commodities like medicines, soaps, packaged food, menstrual products, hygienic products, light fixtures and flashlights, alkali, ­house paint, towels, and cigarettes. Domestic electronics from amco sold ­under Swope’s guidance, as Swope made electrification attractive.15 ­ge cartoon ads seen in figures 1.26 through 1.30 reinforce electricity’s arrival. The map showing the ge logo stretching from the US all the way to China counterbalances a tiny scene of Chinese ­people enjoying a ge electrical fan. The symbiosis between amco and ge typifies what Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins call global multinational-­enterprise financing of light and power, which they date from the late 1870s. Eventually, ge became Conditions of Thinking  •  3 1

1.26  ​ amco-­ge ad promoting

the com­pany as offering one-­stop shopping for all electrical implements. Dongfang zazhi 17, no. 22 (April 25, 1921). 1.27  ​ amco-­ge ad for electric

domestic fan. Funü zazhi 8, no. 5 (May, 1922). 1.28  ​ amco-­ge ad for

all-­purpose electric fan. Dongfang zazhi 23, no. 11 (June 10, 1926).

1.29  ​ amco-­ge ad claiming that an electric

fan cools you off and raises your spirits. Funü

1.30  ​ amco-­ge ad for electric lighting. Funü

zazhi 22, no. 12 (1925).

zazhi 22, no. 2 (January 25, 1925).

China’s leading provider of fixed machines, engineering, facilitation, personnel, and sales for electrification.16 Meanwhile, amco facilitated the technology transfer. While amco sold ge packages and products ­intended to link China with the cap­i­tal­ist world, marketers failed to mention that industrial and communications technology becomes obsolete quickly, so that buyers must regularly pour in new capital or take out more loans to keep utilities online. Projecting a market, in other words, and selling the package do not mean that ge performed well or, more to the point, that Chinese and other buyers got what they paid for. Frederick Brown’s The Statistical Year-­Book of the World Power Conference, 1933/34 listed China as last except for the French colony of Tunis in the percentage of the population living in areas supplied with electricity, and the per-­capita output of electricity in China was so insignificant in ­these years that it did not even register in Bouda Etemad and Jean Luciani’s statistics in World Energy Production, 1800–1985.17

Conditions of Thinking  •  3 3

Area, Capital, and the Treaty-­P ort System Defetishizing the woman-­centered ge bulb ad has restored to legibility a complex business history and a framework, the commercial cap­i­tal­ist financing of modern infrastructure ­under conditions of unequal development; ­later discussions show how and why generic ads appeared, what ads established, and how commercial graphesis conditioned po­liti­cal declarations made in light of ­these newly discovered modern truths. So far, the ge bulb ad has graphically condensed and made vis­i­ble a trading com­pany, amco, which financed light-­bulb distribution and profited from mechanization-­related sales and ser­vices. Defetishization or ideology critique, however, is a start ­because the ad also put a new t­ hing into the environment. Ad epistemology paved the way for new stories about the evolutionary rise of humanity, electricity, modern enlightenment, and sexual se­lection. In this re­spect, advertising icons like the ge bulb ad agent or the modern w ­ oman using Cutex hand-­care products highlighted physiologically mammal, natural-­footed, menstruating cartoon ­women and girls in advertising at the center of commodity fantasies about light bulbs, electricity, and electrical generators. Over the half c­ entury of its existence, amco domestic-­commodity ads linked its products and the modern ­woman figure, an aspirational proj­ect of ­women’s liberation undertaken in the name of economic development. “Treaty portification,” Robert Bickers has argued, was an incremental, systematic pro­cess that corporate imperialists built in physical space. The Nanyang B ­ rothers Tobacco Com­pany (nbt) and bat, like amco and ge, created “China markets” when they localized finance banking and infrastructure engineering and built factories, and piers. Bunding was, Bickers shows, a pro­cess of finding a prominent embankment, or Bund, along a riverbank or inlet and building a predictable skyline of bank facades, public parks, and trading buildings to expedite activities like inviting in a British Maritime Customs official to negotiate trading concessions from local Chinese elites and enclaving European-­style neighborhoods (called concessions) for the exclusive use of foreign entrepreneurs, their real estate developers, and so on.18 In fact, Bunding created a marketing-­communications feedback system, with strategic investment planning, knowledge, and management techniques. Advertising was one component in this system, and ­these ad images for cars, trucks, and tonic medicines are typical images which gratuitously drew in the background new urban or Bund skyscapes (shown in figures 1.31–1.33).19 34 

• Chapter One

1.31  ​Ford sedan against the Bund skyline.

1.32  ​Dr. Jayne’s Modern Urban Profile.

Funü zazhi 22, no. 2 (January 25, 1925).

Dagongbao, March 1, 1919.

Considering the treaty port to be a functional po­liti­cal and financial system sheds more light on corporate imperialism. Lately, historians less concerned with the drama of sovereignty have focused on how business law in par­tic­u­lar worked in a practical sense. The treaty-­port l­ egal regime regulated not just torts and criminal law but finance, trade, banking, shipping, landing laws, weights and mea­sures, and contract disputes—­the entire gamut of regulations needed to build a cap­i­tal­ ist infrastructure, including branding. Treaty-­port courts adjudicated international business, particularly investment, to legitimate in po­liti­cal terms who controlled cap­it­ al­ist production and distribution systems. Chiara Betta, Robert Bickers, Jonathan Howlett, Stacie Kent, and Anne Reinhardt, among o­ thers, show how, in a context of ambiguous sovereignty, economic relations in treaty ports drove the legalization of trade and consequently new commodity product circulation.20 Finance capital built amco and other companies, and the finance-­dominated, treaty-­ port, cap­i­tal­i st po­liti­cal economy thrived ­because Chinese national sovereignty was so tenuous. So, when the “area” of area studies is not a culture or a nation or state, one can also envision it as composed of companies operating globally from fixed offices in Chinese treaty ports or linked to Conditions of Thinking  •  3 5

New York, San Francisco, London, and other financial capitals. The Republic of China was forcibly entered into the Westphalian state system late and ­under unequal diplomatic and economic conditions. This created a conundrum around Chinese sovereignty. Po­liti­cal efforts to establish (in the 1911 Nationalist or Xinhai Revolution) or disestablish (the 1931 Japa­nese puppet state of Manchuria) China’s national bound­aries w ­ ere one impor­tant part of the picture. Another impor­tant part was treaty portification by corporate imperialists and local businesses. ­These components—­stated objectives, corporate imperialism’s institutional and ideological per­for­mance, llc technologies for pushing financialized colonial markets at the beginning of the twentieth ­century—­formed the arena Mao Zedong termed “semifeudal, semicolonial China.”21 Ever-­present commercial advertisements and commercial ephemera drives home the homely everydayness of this bigger picture. In Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins’s definition, the preferred or multinational twentieth-­century financial firm was a business that mobilized foreign direct investments to influence or control foreign activity in which the com­pany invested for strategic goals and expected a return not only from the investment but from the business “package,” including technology and its application: “Multinational enterprises are able to concentrate knowledge. Their investments abroad are far more than financial flows [­because t]hey involve managed resources.”22 No ­matter how vociferously the nationalist republic argued that national products protected national capital, in real­ity, as Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins show, managed economies are not f­ ree to develop their own national strategies or to forge international relations with transnational corporations. Chinese po­liti­cal debates introjected themselves into corporate imperialism, known also by the name twentieth-­century multinational financial firm.23 Figure 1.34 is an advertisement for the Japa­nese brand Jintan and encodes information about the com­pany’s resource management and technique for building local markets. Similar in allure to the amco-­ge bulb ­woman, this ad ­woman is sitting at a desk surrounded by a cornucopia of commodities, including an electric lamp. She is writing Jintan’s brand name in romanized letters. Electricity, light, modern ­women, commodity culture, and ambiguously named brand products (a “Japa­nese” product has a “Chinese” name) are presented in the expectation that all ele­ments

36 

• Chapter One

1.33  ​Chevrolet with Bund

backdrop. Shengjing shibao, July 1922. 1.34  ​Jintan ad showing a

modern liberated ­woman writing at desk. Dongfang zazhi, January 1922, 19:1.

­ ill reinforce each other and associate science, eugenic perfection, high w intelligence, the biomorphic female body, commodity culture, and stylishness. The Jintan Corporation was a modern firm, part of the Taylorist Osaka school. Its public profile had a militaristic tone, but its advertising psy­chol­ogy did not vary from that of corporations like amco, ge, and bat. Even more than most Japa­nese corporate imperialists, Jintan followed the army. Originally selling an herbal digestive, the corporation sculpted product ad campaigns to emphasize the tonic’s ancient origins and modern efficacy: a­ fter all, the pills are a machine-­manufactured, modernist, scientific innovation. A ­later chapter provides a more detailed corporate history, but h­ ere note that the entrepreneurial, technology-­ savvy Jintan executives advertised a world where ­free modern ­people benefited from Japa­nese commodities. Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins’s analy­sis helps consolidate evidence that t­ hese markets ­were extranational yet areal in the sense of areas formed of similarly or­ga­nized corporations and imperialist authority. And sitting comfortably on top is the healthy, literate, socially competent, liberated, organically female, consumer and producer w ­ oman. Sophisticated, patient, agglomerative, and policy driven, Jintan survived or failed to survive on the basis of its capacity to mea­sure circumstances and put into action strategic profit-­making schemes. But large-­scale change does not announce itself as a totality. Buried in ephemera are conditions delivered piecemeal, still available to be used in the effort to explain why ­people and businesses thought what they did and how graphic association worked.

The Nation Fetish versus Management Knowledge ­ arlier I proposed that llcs formed the sine qua non for corporate impeE rialism, so what about Chinese corporations? Sherman Cochran’s comparative study of Jintan and the Chinese Ailuo brain-­tonic brands has indicated that nationalist appeals for commodities produced in China, in factories that Chinese p­ eople owned, did l­ ittle to divert Chinese consumers who showed a marked preference for ge, Jintan, or bat cigarettes.24 No Chinese national brands among the national and nationalist companies selling medicine, drugs, cigarettes, and other domestic commodities succeeded in wresting market share away from the corporate g­ iant Jintan, and none ever created an advertising chimera as power­ful as Brunner, Mond & Co (China) Ltd., a Eu­ro­pean chemical alkali fertilizer conglomerate. 38 

• Chapter One

The importance of management or orga­nizational technology also seems clear in the more famous and successful case of Nanyang ­Brothers Tobacco, nbt, founded in 1906.25 This brand has not been extensively studied as a modern llc, perhaps b­ ecause it is so frequently presumed to have represented national (or ethnic or racialized) capital and partly ­because it brings contradictions to the surface, as Robert Gardella, Jane K. Leonard, and Andrea McElderry have noted.26 The com­pany exemplifies why the llc and advanced business methods sold so much more product ­under conditions that Cochran called a Sino-­Western “rivalry” and I am calling corporate imperialism.27 A consortium of overseas Chinese living in British Ma­la­ya, directed by Jian Yujie (1875–1957) and Jian Zhaonan (1870–1923) and registered ­under successive Chinese governments and the colonial state in Hong Kong over the course of its checkered existence, nbt was a joint-­stock llc.28 It seems to have operated like other cigarette companies, importing tobacco from the United States, soliciting capital from funds around the world, and marketing heavi­ly in Chinese and Southeast Asian cities.29 Its singularity lay in its dubious claim that it represented Chinese sovereignty. Elisabeth Köll, summarizing the work of historians like Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, Parks Coble, and Karl Gerth, shows that the original found­ers, who w ­ ere ­brothers, a­ dopted the pattern of multinational sourcing (Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Japan) and pioneered rolled cigarette markets primarily in areas ­free of taxes and monopolies, such as Thailand, Ma­la­ya, Indonesia, and Borneo. When nbt tried to enter China, it went head-­to-­head with bat, and it bombed. Rather than back out of the trade competition, nbt reconsolidated. In 1918 it registered itself with the then Chinese government ­under warlord Duan Qirui’s puppet president, Xu Shuzheng. Interestingly, in the post-1927 White Terror, the Chiang Kai-­shek coup to exterminate the Chinese Communist Party, Chiang’s Nationalist Party put forward its po­liti­cal apparatchik, T. V. Soong, who forced nbt to appoint him as the firm’s ceo. ­After the civil war, the ­People’s Republic of China nationalized nbt and licensed it to sell the popu­lar brand Double Happiness.30 ­Here the nation plays a fetishistic, not a substantive, role b­ ecause claiming nbt is nationalist or represents national capital has proven untrue. Certainly, ethnicized and racialized Chinese mi­grants ran the corporation, but it, like all firms linked to finance capital investment, obeyed the same requirements that made corporate capitalism profitable, nbt’s self-­presentation and nationalist charisma notwithstanding. Conditions of Thinking  •  3 9

National brands and faux national-­brand cigarettes like nbt traded on the same set of clichés as imperialist brands like bat. In the tobacco advertising I have seen, nothing particularly nationalistic appears in national-­brand iconography. Figure 1.35, a Colleen Moore–­style, short-­ bobbed flapper invites every­one to smoke high-­quality tobacco as she gazes out of the win­dow of her wallpapered mansion, perching on a modernist chaise lounge and gazing speculatively at a billboard for her favorite tobacco brand, White Golden Dragon, seemingly set in a landscaped garden. In figure 1.36, the smoker is presumed male, while the female icon enhances the plea­sure that smoking brings. This is not to say w ­ omen did not smoke, for they obviously did, and ads sometimes addressed ­women; rather, much advertising slanted ­toward a consumer who desired biowomen. Figure 1.37 is branded the Beauty. According to the ad copy, ­these cigarettes are colorful and luscious, fruity and kissable, and worth the money a gent pays to smoke the yummy Beauty brand, a national-­ product cigarette: the ad ran regularly in the trendsetting, cutting-­edge, progressive cultural journal New Youth (Xin qingnian). In this advertising fantasy a female smoker interrogates a mustachioed gentleman sitting on a cushy sofa: “Sir, do you love beautiful ­women?” she asks. It turns out that it is natu­ral to love beautiful ­women but that such ­women have drawbacks, including being scary and ill-­tempered and expecting to get showered with jewels and luxury goods. Yes, the fantasy w ­ oman responds, that is true. However, when you buy a packet of the Beauty brand, you can cuddle it, spend almost nothing on it, avoid balefulness, and be assured of “timeless never-­ending love.” What is nationalist about this ad? Perhaps the global economy just was not hospitable to national capital. For instance, Man Bun Kwan’s case history of the Yongli-­Jiuda Salt Com­pany shows that this Chinese com­pany overcame (that is, took major market share away from) the British-­owned Brunner Mond Corporation only when Yongli-­Jiuda began selling “Chinese” chemicals in Japan, which means profits came when Chinese ­owners sold products to the national e­ nemy. In other words, his intricate case history pre­sents a situation in which a Chinese national product achieved superior market share over its British competitor in East Asia but only in Japan’s home market. To take the lead in market share among corporations vying to maintain China’s weak sovereignty may or may not be considered a national capital.31 Moreover, large transnationals like Brunner Mond (aka Imperial Chemical Industries [ici]) competed against other g­ iant 40 

• Chapter One

1.35  ​Nanyang ­Brothers

brand cigarette ad showing a Colleen Moore–­style bob-­haired girl smoking. Dongfang zazhi 24, no. 23 (December 1, 1927). 1.36  ​Nanyang ­Brothers

ad showing a kissable girl smoking. Dongfang zazhi 25, no. 9 (May 1, 1928). 1.37  ​Nanyang ­Brothers ad

claiming that smoking is better than sex. Xin qingnian 4. May 1918.

multinationals (ig Farben, for instance), not ­little ones like Yongli-­Jiuda. During the period of Kwan’s study, Brunner Mond’s major competitor, the German-­based transnational ig Farben, was already a colossus, dividing Eu­rope and its colonies and situating industrial chemical production in a global economy. China’s colonial markets played a trivial role in World War I, although, as Mark Metzler has shown, the relation of the liberal economic order and Japan’s leveraged investment in Chinese colonies floated on the back of the unstable London gold standard.32 In any case, Madeline Zelin, William Kirby, and other scholars cited ­here have strenuously argued that it is not pos­si­ble to determine what is or is not a Chinese com­pany.33 Zelin in par­tic­u­lar established that beginning in the seventeenth ­century, “informal ­legal structures” regulated Chinese contract law. Shares of trusts ­were bought and sold, f­ amily capital rationally invested, business management had a professional (extra-­ kin-­based) grounding, and unjust business practices ­were punishable in courts of law. According to Zelin, the Qing (the Manchu and final Chinese dynasty, 1644–1911) government had a ­legal platform capable of accommodating the llc and, by the eigh­teenth ­century, offered merchants ­legal options similar to the cap­i­tal­ist firm. As dynastic authority and its ­legal system collapsed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four categories of allowable business companies—­“co-­partnership, ­limited com­pany, joint stock com­pany, and joint stock companies ­limited”—­held firm even before the advent of international business law. This makes the question of how business concerns ­were or w ­ ere not Chinese even more complex. Since t­ here was no Chinese way of ­doing business, why, Zelin asks, “once provided with the option of ­limited liability, did few Chinese firms choose to register?”34 Only two of ­these many contradictions are pertinent ­here. First, nbt never qualified as a Chinese com­pany to begin with, and, second, given that it was an llc, its failure to outcompete bat may have nothing to do with national or ethnic origins. In both its orga­nizational structure and the remarkable extrasovereign sources of its manufacturing material and investment capital, nbt took its profits in complexly transnational commodity chains, selling industrially produced, machine-­rolled cigarettes. By extension, although t­ here ­were individual Chinese-­citizen titans like Mu Xiangyue (1876–1943), who translated and pop­u­lar­ized Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Princi­ples of Scientific Management in Chinese, and advertiser and entrepreneur Huang Chujiu (1872–1931), who also had tremendous business acumen and amassed a fortune, “Chinese business” 42 

• Chapter One

is not a coherent category, and Chineseness does not register in business terms.35 This is a loaded argument. ­Others have pointed out that Chinese Maoist reconstruction hinged on belief that national capital could be captured and nationalized, its profits diverted into building a national economy. How delinking worked u­ nder the dictatorship of the proletariat lies beyond my scope at this point. This much is clear. Understanding how commercial capital linked to international investment funds and their internal orga­nizational technologies may be a more effective way to understand corporate imperialism in China than nationalism or sovereignty.36

Amorphous Brands, Social Logic, and Public Scenes Ambiguous cultural or national identity in relation to business law, cap­ i­tal­i st accounting methods, aggressive marketing plans, and graphic images used in branding speaks to the dissimilarity between semiotic analy­sis and historical reconstruction. Semiosis does not make something happen, and it does not construct itself. It also does not construct a nation or “China.” That said, graphesis conveys historical truths, and it behooves us to figure out how. Often underappreciated, the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century commodity advertising campaigns pivoted around brand marks and cartoon brand building. In publications and out in the urban world, branded commodities communicated visually; they invited viewers and consumers to enter into a modern society. Figure 1.38 is a microexample of how commercial art branded the commodity and synced the commodity to the society. In the Silver Shell oil ad, the viewer sees poetic copy hovering in the sky: “Air is so fresh in the deep green space [of the boulevard] / The new gas auto goes down the road quickly and lithely / Without Shell brand apc gas / Finding a smooth ­ride is not pos­si­ble.” The image’s style comes from lithographs like the famous images published between 1884 and 1898 as the Dianshizhai huabao (literally Illustrated News of the Dianshizhai Lithographic Studio) presenting Shanghai’s foreign concessions and celebrating their European-­style parks, gardens, and trees; paved boulevards; vehicles; and p­ eople walking, riding bicycles, and g­ oing to plea­s ure halls or out with their courtesans. In this reupped con­temporary image, the artist has used a European-­style, central-­vanishing-­point perspective to graphically open a gateway to society. The Asia Pacific Conditions of Thinking  •  4 3

1.38  ​Silver Shell brand

1.39  ​Silver Shell brand

ad. Shengjing shibao 74

ad. Dagongbao,

(May 1906).

November 13, 1929.

Com­pany (apc) distributed Silver Shell–­branded gas, using stoplights and gas pumps to form a literal gate onto the parkway as pictured in the socony images (see figures 1.5 and 1.24). ­Here, studying visual forms for their latent precepts helps show where philosophy is dug into the environment and where dormant and inert visual epistemology can be blasted out of the past. In figure 1.39, the same brand and the same ad artist have two friends extolling the efficiency of apc gas stations on their way to work. Commercial and l­ egal pro­cesses put brand images into circulation in treaty-­port environments. Zuo Xuchu’s history of modern Chinese trademarks and copyright law dates the standardization of trademark registration to 1904. Zuo argues that between 1911, when the dynasty fell, and 1927, when the Nationalist Party seized the state, the history of law is fragmented. Piecing together what he believes to have been turning points, Zuo shows that the Beiyang military junta of 1913 established the trademark registration system on May 3, 1923.37 Regardless of which state claimed sovereignty at the time, the Trademark Gazette (Shangbiao gongbao) continued registering brands throughout the Beiyang and Nationalist periods. Zuo helps clarify a l­egal pro­cess that

44 

• Chapter One

saw corporations from all over the world focused on industrial brands as tools to carve out sales territories. To achieve and register their commercial rights, business organ­izations disarticulated and reassembled their relationships to regional language, orthography, quotidian clichés or norms, national origin, and nationality into repeatable, recognizable, literate, and interestingly distilled and aggregated marks that formed the face of the brand.38 The ­legal (not to mention the commercial) status of branding means that ads are not repre­sen­ta­tions. They are not merely racist slogans frozen into coded form but rather epistemic (and ideological) truths about ­actual existing conditions. However latent in the environment, ­these figurations provide information about where the investment capital came from, and how modern capitalism worked in treaty ports since corporations w ­ ere usually headquartered in metropolitan areas outside the Chinese mainland. In this regard, brand-­marked commercial ephemera induced contemporaries to participate in an emergent, financializing, twentieth-­century cultural life. Among its many registered or copyright-­ protected ad ele­ments, Brunner Mond touted this “moth-­eyebrow moon” along with a double axe and a thumbs-up sign. To protect brand identity during what they anticipated would be a long period of market development, gargantuan corporate imperialists registered each ele­ment of their mark. Figure 1.40 is a good example, a registered Brunner Mond (Buneimen) ad ele­ment. ­These ele­ments combine variously to create lovely posters, like the following image which shows an internationally fash­ion­ able ­woman standing in a field overlooking a pond and a manor ­house (figure 1.41) and another showing a young girl holding a cabbage, wearing a Eu­ro­pean red dress, and smiling at the viewer (figure 1.42). Th ­ ese ads recycled brand mark ele­ments and feature remarkable, lovely ­women, but also focused attention on internationalism, which is another way to reference the colonial world. Thus, for instance, while Brunner Mond relied heavi­ly on images of a classic, sexy Shanghai modern-­girl icon, the British H. C. Dixon and Son yarn ad portrayed a mosque, which in the British Empire signified the alleged oriental or “Turkish” treatment of the tobacco. A Japa­nese corporation produced Washington-­brand resin and another the widely advertised Novonol brand (no Japa­nese language name provided) gonorrhea remedy. In other words, female image often or­ga­nized the ad design, but female cartoons are only one ele­ment of the composite “international” advertising image.

Conditions of Thinking  •  4 5

1.40  ​Brunner Mond fertilizer ad illustrat-

ing how the brand registered ele­ments of its advertising art in the Brand Registry.

Counterintuitively, the corporation’s putative nationality and cultural coding on brands rarely coincided. ­Great examples of this tendency to fabricate cosmopolitan brands are the neotraditional or “Chinese-­style” advertisements associated with foreign-­owned companies; the German corporation Norddeutsche Wollkämmerei und Kammgarnspinnerei tried to copyright the most famous neotraditional story of female devotion ever told, that of Mengzi’s ­mother, who changed her domicile three times to ensure the boy sage would have morally upright friends. La Compagnie Optorg Corporation (a French-­registered com­pany selling woolen textiles in the 1920s but originally a Russian-­based multinational or colonial conglomerate, still in existence ­today, and selling agricultural machines) recycled old clichés about neotraditional Chinese feminine beauties.39 National products, producers, or companies that identified themselves as making patriotic goods did not hesitate to do the same. Perhaps ­these images ­were to indicate stylishness over race or nationality. In any case, copyrighted images show a preference for American and En­glish cultural codes and an association of Eu­ro­ pean visual and language references to “civilized” commodities. Perhaps Chinese-­owned small companies over-internationalized their images, while Japa­nese firms Americanized theirs, perhaps to avoid Chinese anti-­Japanese boycotts. Clearly, however, though brands indiscriminately 46 

• Chapter One

1.42  ​Brunner Mond fertilizer ad with a girl

holding a cabbage. From the collection of Tani Barlow. This image is crinkly ­because it came out of a mattress. When po­liti­cal movements demonized commercial advertising images, rural ­people took them down and put up colorful pictures of Chairman 1.41  ​Brunner Mond fertilizer ad showing stylishly dressed

Mao. They crumpled up the old commercial

­woman in front of pond. From the collection of Tani Barlow.

posters, and made them into insulation.

borrowed national markings, t­ hese compounded images w ­ ere anything but casual. The Trademark Gazette clarifies how seriously corporate imperialists took future-­market planning. socony registered “Pine Brand” and “White Rose Oil” trademarks for kerosene and associated kerosene products, which appear to be dif­f er­ent names for the same commodity; it never reached the market. In addition, socony trademarked the names Spinrex, Turex, Darex, and Cylbrex for types of oil and oil-­burning accoutrements, in anticipation of market advertising. No images accompanied the brands, and the com­pany appears never to have used ­these names or marked commodities ­under them.40 Trademark icons saturated the visual field, as pioneering historian of advertising Roland Marchand argued a generation ago when he demonstrated that U.S. advertisers ­were “apostles of modernity.” The “social tableaux” in the United States featured a newly minted housewife-­subject taking command over her scientific ­house­hold laboratory to solve all the novel (and imaginary) prob­lems that modernity could throw at her, such Conditions of Thinking  •  4 7

as disease and sanitation, including her own bodily excretions (smelly armpits and so on). The new h­ ouse­wife’s prob­lems could be solved with new products, w ­ hether vermin-­vanquishing ddt shot into hidden crevices or ge ­house­hold products that liberated her from (redundant, newly in­ven­ted) ­labor in the newfangled kitchen.41 Chinese treaty-­port advertising graphesis played the same role but with a difference. Treaty-­port advertisers drew social scenes in black-­and-­ white cartoons. Treaty-­port images focused less on ­house­wification and more on the procreative c­ ouple and particularly on the female partner. This happened at ­every level of graphesis. For instance, while eighteenth-­ century Chinese iconography might show a marital bed in a large f­ amily dwelling, twentieth-­century ads situated natu­ral w ­ omen and men in living in their own private ­houses and socializing in the workplace. Small or nuclear families w ­ ere not the preference in nineteenth-­century Chinese ­family theory or practice, and the nuclear or “stem” f­ amily had only the marital bed (figure 1.43) in the larger ­family, not their own h­ ouse or even necessarily their own room. Commercial aspirations for private small-­ family spaces abruptly and visually reinforced a modernist so­cio­log­i­cal truth: that the nuclear ­family is the basis of society, and the ­woman is a copartner in modern ­family life (figure 1.44). ­There is nothing intuitive 1.43  ​Eighteenth-­

century marital bed. Origin unknown https://­ commons​ .­wikimedia​.­org​ /­wiki​/F ­ ile:China​ _­Marital​_­bed​ .­jpg.

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• Chapter One

1.44  ​Dr. Yan’s brand medicinal tonic ad with an image of a modern marital bed. Dagongbao,

March 17, 1919. 1.45  ​ amco ad selling Pacific brand bathroom appliances. Dongfang zazhi 21, no. 11 (June 10, 1924). 1.46  ​An ad for Éclat toiletry products showing ­mother and child in bathroom. Funü zazhi 10, no. 1

(1924). 1.47  ​Colgate ad showing a modern ­woman’s boudoir. Dagongbao 386 (April 7, 1922), 60.

about this truth, as I w ­ ill show ­later. Not surprisingly, however, ad culture promoted nuclearization when it hawked hardware for indoor flush toilets and r­ unning w ­ ater; the modern bathroom (figure 1.45)—an amco package—­and the nuclear ­couple enjoying modern partner marriage in a dreamscape of h­ ouse, sexually appropriate accoutrements, and personal auto (figure 1.46). Ads show fantastic scenes of private bathing and interiors of intimate, domestic f­ amily life, depicting the new bourgeois order of the wife, who appears at her vanity t­ able (figure 1.47), the husband, and the ­c hildren in their own quarters (figure 1.48), sans parents, in-­laws, cousins, friends, and servants. L ­ ater chapters elaborate the so­c io­log­i­cal assumptions showcased in ­these ads, set out in public graphesis. ­Here the point is balder: imaginary forms of value expressed in advertising cartoons, the other scenes of use value, reinforced the new platitude that h­ umans live in socie­ties of their own making and that one progressive evolutionary option is commodity purchase and use. Th ­ ese ads are so­cio­log­i­cal and not by accident. Corporate ads conveyed a component, w ­ omen, who like the ge light-­bulb girl, herself an ad agent, live in society by virtue of natu­ral rights, education, and social evolution. The event of ­women is confirmed in ­these corporate imperialist commodity ads starring ordinary (which is to say not courtesan or sexually compromised, like movie actresses) ­women who have legitimately left the chaste w ­ omen’s domestic quarters to play public social roles in a new, marketized world. Marketized, commercialized conditions would situate w ­ omen at the nexus of the modern advertising industry, critical and empirical theories of society, and the early twentieth-­century theory and practice of commercial capital. The corporate story of bat shows this nexus: bat was like amco but bigger, and ­because bat sold industrially rolled and packaged cigarettes ­under multiple brand names, it is famous for creating a market in products that have no use value; their value lies in the fantastic scenes or dreamscapes that advertising technology enacts. According to Howard Cox’s celebrated monograph The Global Cigarette: Origins and Evolution of British American Tobacco, 1880–1945, bat imported tobacco produced around the world, trained a racially mixed staff and advertisers of many nationalities, and financed a so­cio­ log­i­cally based market-­building technology.42 In what became a pattern, bat first bought a medium-­size, regionally significant, Chinese-­owned advertising agency, Wing Tai Vo (wtv) or Yong Tai He. Now when the news media markets opened, this Chinese-­owned business advertised 50 

• Chapter One

1.48  ​ ge brand electric fan

ad showing a happy man in a nuclear-­family setting. Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 13 (July 10, 1921).

its own advertising ser­v ices in the financial newspaper Shen Bao. But Cox shows that bat wanted wtv’s local knowledge of potential consumers, learning how wtv targeted consumers and what accounts it handled. Then, interestingly, bat not only suspended its native-­informant policy but also authorized a wtv employee, Zhang Bozhao (1861–1951), to market his own brand, called ­Great Britain (Dayingpai). It is unclear ­whether or not Zhang’s product was a rebranding of bat’s Ruby Queen. The adaptation by bat of a local Cantonese nickname for a product that literally means “Red Tinfoil Package” and the long campaigns to establish Ruby Queen suggest they might have been two brands. In any case, Zhang copied bat’s business plan and engineered a way to make wtv tobacco ser­v ices a subsidiary of bat, the larger corporate imperialist. By one chronology, Zhang had also sold cigars and raw tobacco that he purchased in the Philippines, so while the ad arm remains relatively Conditions of Thinking  •  5 1

mysterious, the tobacco sales rec­ord makes sense. If this story bears out, then Zhang was a subimperialist working in the same commercialized commodity streams as bat.43 Although bat and amco sold dif­fer­ent commodities, they had the same internal finance and accounting technologies. The difference is that bat excelled in market formation. It not only relied on wtv but assimilated it. It transformed Chinese-­owned firms, and while keeping ­those brands ­v iable, bat aggressively branded, marketed, distributed, and leveraged itself and its technologies to form an umbrella over all of its acquired or new, market-­tested brands. In figure 1.49, the artist has drawn bats flying in the sky, thus presenting two jokes. The Chinese national language makes the noun for the flying bat a homonym for the character fu (branded as fuk in Cantonese pronunciation), or good fortune, so the brand is literally called fortune. Not ­every viewer would automatically see this language game, but in the early 1920s, a period of linguistic and visual hijinks brought the potential buyer to “an omen

1.49  ​BAT cigarette ad

showing literal bats indicating good fortune. Dagongbao, March 29, 1922.

52 

• Chapter One

of prosperity,” referencing the bat’s role in Chinese popu­lar arts and drawing attention to all the brands bat sold. Mirroring bat’s iconography, a literal flying bat, “bat” in En­glish is a homonym for “good omen” in Chinese, which might have been a funny bit of news in the coming commodity order.44 Dreamscapes of word and image are epiphenomenal in bat’s ­actual practices, which made native in­for­mants and punning secondary to so­c io­log­i­cal market building. Traveling salesmen of all nationalities used bat’s Form 163 to report pertinent sales information back to bat headquarters. The fill-in blanks included the name of the town or village, population size, names of local tobacco dealers, location of merchandise depots, brands currently on sale, currency exchange rates in any specific locale (allowing bat to undercut competitors), income stratification in the village, and questions about the likely consumer base. Granular so­cio­log­i­cal information meant bat-­China established one of the most innovative marketing-­management systems in the world.45 Its basic profit generator was signed contracts with local agents who put up sufficient collateral, meaning the com­pany risked nothing. It extended credit to a vendor in the form of bat-­packaged cigarettes. If products sold, then bat profited; if not, it lost nothing and apparently retrieved the product. On the basis of its social-­data feedback system, bat had figured out how to or­ga­nize just-­in-­time tobacco delivery and stabilize inventory. The feedback loop allowed bat sales outlets to adjust accounting and management to localities and to open pos­si­ble profit each step of the way. According to Cox, bat managed a full-­blown distribution mechanism of its own making: it retooled existing Chinese trading companies along ­these modern social logics and economic rationalities, “instituting an administrative framework that brought within its orga­nizational compass a ­great many of the established trading firms that ­were already serving the traditional Chinese economy and by allowing certain of the ele­ments within this distribution mechanism to compete against one another.”46 So, repeating the trick mentioned e­ arlier, where the llc grafted itself onto older mercantile practices, bat grafted U.S. and Eu­ro­pean financial methods onto an already networked population of mercantile companies and expanded the rolled-­cigarette market into rural China using so­cio­log­i­cal surveys. In that regard, bat resembles the Japa­nese Southern Manchuria Railway Corporation, or Mantetsu, which also conducted d­ etailed vil-

Conditions of Thinking  •  5 3

lage sociologies as it laid railway ser­vice in Japanese-­occupied Northeast China. The graphesis of bat, its remarkable ability to convey ideas and associations in graphic form, also gave it a leg up. In at least one case, a bat subsidiary trade com­pany branded “New York” learned through failing brands that girl images ­were the sine qua non component in successful advertising. In the New York brand’s advertising images, only three (out of forty-­plus images) pictured female figures, and all of them ­were bound-­footed kin in the segregated ­women’s quarters of a large, patrilineal ­family dwelling.47 Figure 1.50, one of ­these, shows cloistered w ­ omen looking decidedly unsexy, engaged in conventional ­women’s work sewing cloth shoes. The Two Gorgeous Girls cosmetics brand would test for gendered images, too, before founder Nakamura de­cided on an all-­ girl-­icon blitz campaign. W ­ hether bat also field-tested brand images in the market before it settled on the social-­woman image has not yet been established, but it is probable. Tested or not, pre­ce­dent drawings in a 1900 edition of the twelfth-­century ­Family Regulation (Zhuzi jiali) by Zhu Xi (figure 1.51), a Martin Luther equivalent in the history of Chinese thought, suggest how ads and old texts w ­ ere generically the same, modern and compatible.

1.50  ​Ad for New York brand showing clois-

1.51  ​Image from a 1900 republication of

tered ­women being hectored by patriarchal

twelfth-­century scholar Zhu Xi’s ­Family

­family man. Dagongbao, June 5, 1919.

Rule Book.

54 

• Chapter One

Thinking about Truth Conditions for thinking about the ­f uture, the ground for the strug­gle over ­whether China would remain an adjunct to corporate imperialism, a national brand rather than a chimerical, sovereign cap­i­tal­ist nation, are scattered ­here, immanent in commercial ephemera and their situated histories. The vari­ous relationships of national capital, corporate imperialism, sovereignty, colonialism, and anticapitalist or revolutionary organ­ izing suggest that the logic of the nation and the logics of commercial capitalization are not pos­si­ble to completely disentangle. Not only is the “area” in area studies unusable in this context, but sovereignty itself is just one of many ele­ments conditioning thought, business models, investment strategies, and profit seeking. Visionary prophets from Mu Xiangyue, promoter of Taylor’s The Princi­ples of Scientific Management, to He-­Yin Zhen, an anticapitalist feminist anarchist, w ­ ere not parochial, or just national, or even regional in a physical, geographic sense ­because they ­were, in theory and in fact, extranational.48 By the same token, so was Rudolf Hilferding, who in 1910 coined the term finance capital.49 Just as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg had, Hilferding figured out how to explain anticipated changes just unfolding in his lifetime. All wrote in the ­future anterior and anticipated totalities that we now clearly discern with the benefit of hindsight. Hilferding began his analy­sis of changes in industrial capitalism with t­ hese words: “The most characteristic features of ‘modern’ capitalism are t­ hose pro­cesses of concentration which, on the one hand, ‘eliminate f­ ree competition’ through the formation of cartels and trusts, and on the other, bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship.”50 Hilferding described corporations like amco that or­ga­nized business planning around financial funds, banks, and holding companies. For instance, amco had struck a relation with the Pacific Commercial Com­pany of Manila, which at one time had owned it (at least on paper) and actually financed amco’s expansion, exactly illustrating Hilferding’s point. The creation of surplus value valorizes capital, and valorizing capital, he recognized, was the ­whole point of capitalism. So, when amco or bat traded in promissory notes and credit, they transformed how goods ­were exchanged. U ­ nder capitalism, t­ here are use and exchange values, the ­labor pro­cess that produces and the value-­creating pro­cess that commodifies ­human ­labor and produces money surplus. Credit is one way to marketize money capital. Gerard Swope did that in the early 1920s when Conditions of Thinking  •  5 5

he expanded ge’s capacity to market consumer or domestic appliances and extend consumer-­credit ser­v ices. In t­ hese times—­for Hilferding the first de­cade of the twentieth c­ entury—­capitalism showed tremendous change. Financialized industrialization was accumulating what he termed “idle capital,” or money capital that was not circulating, was not producing surplus. Entrepreneurs like Meyer captured this idle, unproductive money capital and started marketizing it, or lending it out in the form of financing for a steam engine or, à la bat, collateralized machine-­ rolled cigarettes sold in tins. Hilferding describes a banking system in which banks lend one another idle capital at short-­term rates. This is the promissory note or extended credit that bat developed in its rural markets. Based on survey information, bat in­ven­ted a new credit cycle at the micro or village consumer/distributor level. Once survey agents had established how much discretionary capital was available to men in villages, the com­pany set an affordable price for Hataman smokes, for instance, sometimes undercutting their own profit margin or undercutting another bat brand, Ruby Queen, and forwarded inventory to the village distributor. For Hilfer­ ding, this is how banks and financial or lending institutions became the arbiters of the business cycle. They, too, mea­sured the long-­term sales arc for capital itself. Financial entities stepped in when ­there w ­ ere shortfalls in commodity production, shortfalls in payment of the notes, or any failures to make good on a loan. In the larger system, Hilferding points out, extension of intramural cash into caches of idle money meant consolidated capital would end up in the hands of larger corporations and transnational corporations on the international scale.51 Again, we see this in action when bat assimilated wtv and ge assimilated amco. Hilferding points out that when financing gains importance in a business cycle, transnational corporations become ­v iable in a new way. However, the historical moment immanent within capital requires specific historical conditions to materialize, and that is precisely what amco achieved. And with regard to how we understand conditions of thinking, ­t hese ongoing events in commercialization and banking histories, philosophy, and po­liti­cal economy set the framework of intelligibility. Commercial ephemera and their material contribution in Chinese treaty-­port socie­ties help to evidence what t­ hose historical conditions actually ­were. Adapting Hilferding in this context helps to clarify the general conditions that commercial capital would come to involve. To bankers, 56 

• Chapter One

c­ ommercial researchers, and writers in Chinese treaty ports at the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, the German theorist’s points w ­ ere not philosophical at all. On the ground in Shanghai, for instance, theorists ­were explaining and anticipating changes as they comprehended them. Srinivas Ram Wagel, a Sikh business reporter working at the North-­ China Daily News and Herald in Shanghai published an impor­tant analy­sis in his 1914 study Finance in China. Wagel reflected a similar point to Hilferding, extrapolating in a negative sense that native banks did not keep reserves in silver or gold and that meant they could not be productive or financially sound. Wagel explained that Chinese financial infrastructure had lagged b­ ehind the international system (no standard, no silver-­to-­gold market, no capital reserves in native banks, no silver mines in Mexico, and so on) since the global shift in the mid-­ nineteenth c­ entury to the London-­based gold standard. China had remained on its wobbly silver standard, but it had never addressed the question of abstract value since its old-­fashioned commercial networks had worked on trust relations rather than universal exchangeability. The greatest anomaly, Wagel thought, was that Chinese banks and financiers did not float value. “The values of commodities in China being in silver, and the values of commodities in other parts of the world being in gold,” he argued, was part of the prob­lem.52 A more profound concern was that neither metal stabilized as the mea­sure of value. In the native Chinese economy, gold and silver w ­ ere both commodities, though silver had more universal value than gold. ­Because gold and silver ­were both fundamentally commodities and not what Wagel called “mea­sures of value,” the abstract quality of the metal could not be extricated from its ­simple value as a t­ hing, a pre­industrial commodity.53 This led to instability at the economy’s core b­ ecause “gold . . . ​i s simply a commodity while silver, although it is still considered a commodity, is also a mea­sure of value” that can be depreciated (silver from Mexico) or devaluated back into a use value (dowry jewelry). In a cap­i­tal­ist manufacturing economy, instability and interchangeability of value and commodity got outproduced by a massive inpouring of commercial capital. Lacking its own financialized money, the local economy lost ground to international forces. This argument led Wagel to conclude that “the fundamental difficulty with all industrial pro­gress in China, as in most of the Asiatic countries, is the lack of capital.”54 And Wagel was by no means the only local cap­it­ al­ist economist theorizing treaty-­port conditions. Conditions of Thinking  •  5 7

J. D. Edkins, a former missionary and researcher, approached the question of value from a deeply localist perspective and seemingly sought to advise Chinese banking officials in the late Qing period. His 1905 Banking and Prices in China frankly described the role that financialized capital was playing in the g­ reat economic transformation he saw emerging. In par­tic­u­lar, foreign banks, which he also called “colonial syndicates,” poured surplus money into urban infrastructure, building the real estate market and the commercial outlets and financing factories (flour, cotton, silk, concrete), and this financialization changed the Chinese economy beyond recognition. Commercialized money capital, pouring in from national banks and fly-­by-­night capital-­holding companies all over the world, valued capital in relation to the gold standard and put local, relatively inflexible merchants and banks at a disadvantage. Edkins more than Wagel outlined in tremendous detail how the gold standard worked and what role gold played in stabilizing colonial economies; banks in Hong Kong, India, and Australia participated in the financialization of banking in Chinese treaty ports. ­These national banks played a role in national economies and in international commerce ­because they provided the necessary metal collateral, gold in most cases. Not only did China not have a national bank, he pointed out, but it also barely had a mint b­ ecause metals serving as tokens of exchange could take the form of a lump and did not require a banking imprimatur.55 Wagel, Edkins, and Hilferding ­were prescient and knowledgeable. Ji Zhaojin’s recent general history of banking in China notes that the rise of foreign commercial banks began in 1847 and that over the next half ­century commercial capital overwhelmed the banking and investment conditions.56 Only in 1895, with its government u­ nder unbearable stress, did the Qing state fi­nally establish a national bank that stabilized Chinese currency, leaving the government prey to unpayable loans in durable, predatory currencies. A ­ fter the Xinhai Revolution, the po­liti­ cal successors seized control over banking systems, but this also collapsed when the ruling party stacked the national bank with apparatchiks. ­Here intellectual history and the local theorization of ongoing events lay out the conditions for understanding what the commercial capital, its commodity culture, and its ephemera mean historically. The range of goods and ser ­v ices amco offered fits Hilferding’s description of how finance capital made specific commodities v­ iable in a place like China in the 1920s and 1930s. His model also helps explain how the advertising

58 

• Chapter One

business mushroomed into a profit-­generating industry. As I develop in ­later chapters, very large firms like the British-­owned Millington, largish companies like Shanghai-­based C. P. Ling Com­pany, and smaller players like Carl Crow w ­ ere all intermediaries for major global business advertising accounts (Ford, Coca-­Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Lever ­Brothers, Heinz, Parker Pen, Gillette Industries, ­etc.). C. P. Ling, Millington, and Carl Crow (all ad agencies using information surveys; Crow had par­tic­ u­lar interest in newspaper publication) played a central role in the commercialization of commodity markets.57 Financialization of village-­level cigarette consumption depended on branding bat cigarettes with ­easily identified icons and packages. C. P. Ling studied the social science of advertising sciences and was, like Nakayama Taichi, founder of the Nakayama Taiyodo, or Club Cosmetics Com­pany, deeply involved in theorizing advertising. While Hilferding was a German Marxist economist writing a de­cade before Chinese colonial modernity had fully formed, he would have had no prob­lem grasping how amco, ge, bat, Standard Oil, Yongli-­Jiuda Salt Com­pany, Brunner Mond, Nakayama Taiyodo, Jintan, Toyoda, or nbt was or­ga­nized. “The most characteristic features of ‘modern’ capitalism,” Hilferding anticipated in his analyses and futuristic speculation, “are ­those pro­cesses of concentration which, on the one hand, ‘eliminate ­free competition’ through the formation of cartels and trusts, and on the other, bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship.”58 The history of bat particularly illuminates how an imperialist corporation strategically crowded all potential competitors out of just-­then-­opening markets: buying mercantile companies, raising and lowering brand-­differentiated product costs, and extending financialization to the ground-­level consumer. To Marxists as well as bourgeois po­liti­cal economists, the existence of an economy presumes the category of society. A ­ ctual businesspeople, for their part, had to survey and mea­sure potential consumer communities. They had to adjust prices so that even the poor consumers in a community w ­ ere able to buy cigarettes and buy on credit. The llc distributed risk and invited capital investments from groups, banks, and individuals globally. But this desire to buy and to consume, particularly h­ ouse­hold commodities, also had to be created, and it had to be explained. The alleged instinctual need to evolve forward expressed itself in the new ­thing known as society, but society, at least in bourgeois economic theory, was a

Conditions of Thinking  •  5 9

constellation of potential consumers. Hilferding put into abstract analytic language a transformation that even the poorest urban villa­ger would feel and might understand; that is, the amco or bat brands reached that person only ­after creating a market and drawing on social information provided by embedded operatives. Information drove technical changes like the rationalization of ­labor in relation to the Bonsack cigarette-­rolling machine. The logic of commercial capital affected millions of p­ eople, including my mother-­in-­law, an upper-­middle-­class ­house­wife in Shanghai during the 1920s. Mrs. Chuan-­hua Gershom Lowe moved through a landscape saturated with billboards, trolley ads, and movie posters; she consumed magazines like Liangyou (The young companion) and stories about movie stars, foreign and domestic. She bought large quantities of the branded antiseptic Listerine, and she lived a modern, hygienic life. Created markets meet a­ ctual consumption in the everyday life of p­ eople I have known, like my late husband’s ­mother. The bodies Mrs. Lowe kept clean, sanitary, healthy, fash­ion­able, acquisitive, and enlightened ­were in historical terms precisely where generalizations about branding and financialization meet.

Graphesis and the Brand in the Event of ­Women Advertisements shape our perception of everyday life and document the charisma of the commodity form. But early twentieth-­century advertising images also tell historians where corporations opened their headquarters, where they established branch offices, and where consumers could find retail outlets for anything from light bulbs to steam engines, right down to an outlet’s street address and telephone number. Th ­ ese data lead us outward. The modern business firm is not a mystery or a theory but a praxis that changed both physical and emotional landscapes. Commodities received in treaty ports often circulated through them, from one port to ­others. With the exception of Japa­nese corporate imperialists, lower in profile so they could work from the hinterlands and mask their militarism, most firms established flagship offices and began the work of creating markets around ­these centers. This pattern of commodity circulation and marketing gives the event of ­women a non-­or unnational quality since corporate imperialism played such a central role in establishing the conditions for acting on the truth of ­women. ­Women images figured centrally into the ads. The new landscape delivered truths about 60 

• Chapter One

physiological ­women (fitted clothing, natu­ral feet, unbound breasts, hormones, menstruation, birth control) and consequently conditions indivisible from po­liti­cally inspired actions that would install truth in ­human praxis. In other words, one cannot remove capitalism from the truth of ­women b­ ecause an event is a po­l iti­c ally inspired action to install a newly discovered truth. The evidence strongly suggests that the corporate imperialist advertising industry delivered the natu­ral w ­ oman into everyday life. At the conclusion of this chapter, He-­Yin Zhen’s polemics ­w ill help us understand how a po­liti­cal theorist installs an event of ­women; recognizing a newly discovered truth, she cantilevers a critique against finance capital and the patriarchy and solidifies ­women’s natu­ ral rights. Other nationalist figures—­Qiu Jin comes to mind—­would also contribute po­liti­cally inspired actions to install the same truth.59 But h­ ere my point is to demonstrate that ­under Chinese modern conditions the event of ­women exceeded the tremulous nation state. Of course, national advertising campaigns create national visual aesthetics aimed at selling commodities and setting up local or indigenous female commodity markets, styles, manners, and so on, but the event of ­women was not national. The arena where po­liti­cal theorists perceived a new truth of ­women turns out to be the same area that multinational enterprises established to manufacture and market their products. ­These are areal, not national, markets, socie­ties, collectivities, and so on. Companies such as amco, ge, Jintan, and so many o­ thers exploited the tenuous Chinese sovereignty. They reinforced international trade law as they installed “national” commercial aesthetics. U ­ nder conditions of financial capitalism, the truth of ­women, appearing in ad iconography, collaborated from inside an expanding formation.60 Walter Benjamin’s point about the image being dialectics at a standstill and historical truth being eternal yet never timeless helps when we consider corporate imperialism’s contribution to the conditions for material history. Benjamin also remarked, not unkindly, that historical truth being material is therefore “far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.”61 Yes, and more scientific—­proving that h­ umans are mammals—­than nationalist. That is, in advertising graphesis, the ­woman is always a universal (a mammal), and she is always part of something labeled the larger society. This is true ­because ­women’s truth lies in discoveries about ­human biology and the physiology of sexual difference. But it is also true b­ ecause the po­liti­cal motivation to install a truth about physiological difference and Conditions of Thinking  •  6 1

h­ uman social life was integrated into the economic and po­liti­cal conditions outlined ­here. Social logics are part of what Benjamin obligingly attributes to Karl Marx, the notion that research “has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its vari­ous forms of development and trace out their inner connections.”62 With that research underway, I find social logics in play b­ ecause every­one from evolutionary phi­los­o­ pher Yan Fu to Chinese Communist translator and cultural revolutionary Qu Qiubai recognized that all sentient beings, even insects, live in socie­ties. The truth of h­ uman social interaction and social nature lies in the beating heart of marketing efforts and in graphesis, which always features w ­ omen in society. So ­things (commodities), the commodity form (modern relations of producers and purchasers), ideas (e.g., economic theories), technologies (the llc), and the female advertising icon are inseparable. Since truth, in another Benjaminian aphorism, “is not, as is often thought, to instruct by means of historical descriptions or to educate through comparisons, but to cognize by immersing itself in the object[s],” the ge bulb ad has allowed me to build a stable set of historical truths.63 I have situated the ad at this central point. The study mounts hundreds of advertising images to materialize po­liti­cal theory and voluntarist acts. The companies that marketed the light bulbs, launched the advertising campaign, brokered the relationship to ge, and negotiated with capital funds to commercially subsidize investment in products from trolley systems to electric fans have left material traces. Th ­ ere is no comparative framework in this argument. Nor is this a particularly descriptive history ­because I have argued a point rather than describing a constellation of objects. Immersed in objects—­commercial advertising ephemera—we can cognize evidence left ­behind in the trash, crystallized in the amber of the past.

In the Event of ­Women In 1903, three years before amco was founded, seven years before Hilferding’s masterwork appeared in German, and twenty-­three years before Li Da wrote his pathbreaking Xiandai shehuixue (Modern sociology), the Chinese anarchist feminist He-­Yin Zhen published a series of declarations about the natu­ral rights of ­women.64 She began from a new truth, presupposing w ­ omen to be physiological, natu­ral rights–­b earing, 62 

• Chapter One

erotically motivated animals b­ ecause natu­ral, organic body rights inhere in w ­ omen’s and men’s mammal being. As do all mammals, w ­ omen must express their sexual destinies, erotic desires, and reproductive needs. She and all Chinese anarchists strug­gled over the ethics of sociobiological interiorities. She held that natu­ral ­woman was a universal category and that all over the world w ­ omen in socie­ties w ­ ere suffering similar impediments to the ones she experienced when she sought to express her natu­ral rights. Recollect that an event is called when someone arises out of the latent totality of the conditions of historical possibility, to po­liti­cally act on a new truth. He-­Yin was by no means the only person to notice. Theorists of all kinds, respectable aspiring cosmopolitan ­women like Mrs. Chuan-­hua Gershom Lowe (née Sharon Nieh Hsien-en), martyrs like Qiu Jin (1875–1907) and Tan Sitong (1865–1898), and avant-­ garde consumers invoked international anatomical and physiological truths and integrated them, placing the rights and the corporeality into a subject, w ­ omen. But He-­Yin is by far the most trenchant and po­liti­cally insistent. He-­Yin’s writing vividly showed global capitalism delivering nonnegotiable conditions. The truth of ­women ­under oppressive conditions could only be agonistically expressed, since while evolutionary theory had revealed ­women’s animality, commercial capital constrained our efforts to act ethically on the basis of our ­human truth. Painfully, she set out an agonizing rationale. ­Women, a biosocial collectivity, she argued, had had their natu­ral rights and rights to subsistence v­ iolated throughout patriarchal history. The solution required Chinese ­women to kill. She knew that capitalism was the culprit in her time, the fundamental cause of ­human misery, and that men, like w ­ omen, suffered u­ nder its regime. But she was si­mul­ta­neously aware that patriarchy had done its work even before capitalism. Her own violent disposition led her to state that “­every single man,” ­under capitalism and ­under Confucian patriarchy, “has contributed to the oppression of ­women to the point of [­women’s] death.”65 In this, He-­Yin raised the promise of modern feminism, that a self-­declared w ­ oman can speak for all w ­ omen and can claim her experience to be normative. This is a true subject, a ­woman, forwarding herself, declaring her truth as a ­woman to be natu­ral, universal, and grounds for a community of ­women. Yet in the event of ­women, nothing is so ­simple. Why, she asked rhetorically, as men “started to treat ­women as their private property,” did t­ here emerge “extreme . . . ​differentiation” between ­women and male subjects?66 Conditions of Thinking  •  6 3

And with that query she raised the specter haunting her oeuvre, sexuality. He-­Yin named the event and participated in it. Philosophically, for an event to occur, t­ here has to be in the environment a superfluity, what in Alain Badiou’s language is a multiple, and t­ here has to be a subject. In theory, the tricky part is that ­those who can recognize a truth emerge, anomalies, out of normal multiples, ordinary groupings or sets of ­things. The characteristic that makes He-­Yin singular is that she not only recognized what the Badiouists call the “evental site,” and what I am calling ­here the conditions for thinking, but also guided and s­ haped the outcome of the event of ­women. She not only expressed her loyalty or, again in Badiou’s language, fidelity to an event or evental site but actually nominated ­women herself. To nominate in this philosophical world is to determine po­liti­cally what actually exists, yet has not yet been recognized or realized. To nominate is to ontologize truth, and in He-­Yin’s manifestos lies the constitution of the event of ­women, a realization that ­women are ­humans. This is no mean feat. Of course, the conditions that enabled He-­Yin to denominate an entire class of subjects, w ­ omen, are themselves complex, and this chapter has just scratched its surface. But in addressing the conditions for thinking, it is also keenly impor­tant to note how voluntarist declarations shape the world. In an exegesis, one of Badiou’s most compassionate critics, Quentin Meillassoux, puts it this way: “The subject intervened not only in the ­labor of fidelity to the past event, but in its very constitution, since without nomination, the event itself could not occur.”67 When I claim that the event of ­women is a po­liti­cally inspired action to install a newly discovered truth, I am revising Badiou’s formula and voicing another point in prosaic, nonphilosophical language. It turns out that minor figures, sloppy thinkers, ragged ­people, and even ­women also mobilize po­liti­cally inspired action to install newly discovered truths. ­There is, for the rec­ord, nothing in Badiou’s g­ reat oeuvre to preclude me from legitimately (and ­under his patronym) making such a claim.68 Simply put, the po­liti­cal act is more common than phi­los­op­ hers i­ magined. One need not be a Mao Zedong (politics), a Paul Celan (poetry), a Paul Cohen (science), or a Jacques Lacan (love) to do this or to know truth. In fact, an event surrounding a truth that is absolutely not obscure but, on the contrary, obvious to all readers—­popu­lar science comes to mind—­ spreads like wildfire, like a prairie fire. He-­Yin saw this multiple as an

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event, and she nominated it po­liti­cally on the basis of her still queasy insight that h­ uman beings are mammals. This actually is new news, and in He-­Yin’s hands, sexuality became the primal social and physiological force. Her writing pivoted around the allegation that sexuality is a mammal drive. Unnaturally repressing female sexuality (i.e., cloistering elite ­women) leads not to virtuous chastity but to hypersexualization and, consequently, to w ­ omen’s chronic sexual misconduct. The claim that feudal society represses ­women is obviously easier to defend when sexuality is understood to be naturally and biologically innate. And this is even easier if being a good mammal means sexual se­lection, the social act of choosing an appropriate mate, and the claiming of natu­ral rights, including the rights to one’s own sexuality and bodily existence. To demonstrate that the more elevated and elite the Chinese ­family, the more disgustingly licentiousness its ­women, He-­Yin gave lots of historical examples of female sexual transgressions to show that “the intended consequence [of cloistering] is to encourage ­women to indulge freely in sexual fantasies even though the original intention was to deny them freedom. In other words, the prohibition of sexual transgression . . . ​ encourages sexual transgression in practice.”69 On the other hand, sexual conduct among so-­called liberated ­women leads to “self-­indulgence” or “blind passion” and logically (if we take He-­Yin’s suppositions to their conclusion) to self-­degradation.70 Her primary point is that overthrowing capitalism and men is a realistic option, ­because the historical rec­ord of ­women’s v­ iolated natu­ral rights cannot other­wise be resolved. Not only was He-­Yin a pioneer in feminist philosophy, as Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko, her translators, editors, and interpreters, have argued, but He-­Yin put into play a liberated female subject in a filthy cap­i­tal­ist world. She could imagine that the truth of ­women’s physiological difference from men forced self-­nominating ­women to walk a tightrope: in pursuit of her natu­ral sexual expression, a ­woman might cave to the patriarchy or auto-­degrade herself. In contrast, the age-­old “chastity cult” that rewarded ­w idows for refusing to remarry also, according to He-­Yin, gave Chinese w ­ omen a potential leg up in the strug­gle of the liberated. Why? According to He-­Yin’s speculation, a­ fter killing all the cap­i­tal­ists, Chinese old-­world sexual discipline might protect Chinese ­women from turning into Euro-­Americans who live ­under conditions where “the moral prohibitions are far more lax than in China [and where] it is not shameful to prostitute oneself.”71

Conditions of Thinking  •  6 5

One prominent and fascinating part of He-­Yin’s po­liti­cal act of recognizing the truth of ­women is her ambivalence. Resting her argument on anarchist theorists Kaneko Kiichi (1875–1909) and Tazoe Tetsuji (1875–1908), He-­Yin proposed that the unequal distribution of wealth was the main reason ­women had so few options. Even being vis­i­ble in a corrupt cap­i­tal­ist society required w ­ omen to submit to marriage and acquiesce to “the combined humiliation of being both prisoner and slave,” which meant, in po­liti­cal terms, inflicting abjection on oneself. “This situation cannot but lead to a point where the idea of ­woman itself is rendered utterly inhuman,” she wrote, so that to be individuated, to claim the truth of being a w ­ oman in a po­liti­cal sense, meant being responsible for the consequences of one’s actions.72 To make a living wage yet avoid prostitution or slavery (self-­abjection), w ­ omen had to overthrow capitalism.73 Touchingly—in what was r­ eally the only position pos­si­ble, given her logic of innate oppression and ethical sexuality—­He-­Yin figured that “if we want love to flourish, then we must first abandon money. . . . ​[W]hatever tendencies ­toward brutalities or lingering licentious customs remained, t­ hese could be rectified expediently. Therefore, a ­woman’s revolution must go hand in hand with an economic one.”74 He-­Yin argued that repudiating the commodity form would be impossible without social revolution. In a passage that appears to argue ­either that w ­ omen are h­ uman but do not recognize our humanity or that we have not yet become visibly h­ uman, she wrote, “Suppose we are granted our humanity? How w ­ ill that square with our historical rec­ord of passivity? How can we tolerate this oppression day a­ fter day and not think about re­sis­tance?”75 He-­Yin often used a rhe­toric that complicated the relation of ­women subjects u­ nder natu­ral law. That logic is: If I am a natu­ral ­woman mammal, then how should I act ethically and socially? This is an evental claim in a world that w ­ ill strug­gle violently to shape acceptable be­hav­ior. She goes to war over the fact that ­women are a universal physiological and natu­ral rights–­bearing category of ­human beings, yet in cap­i­tal­ist, patriarchal society are invis­i­ble ­because men and cap­i­tal­ists deny ­women’s innate natu­ral rights. She wrote to authorize ­women to be w ­ omen, but her positioning was complicated since she both stated the truth of ­women and anticipated complications stemming from ­women’s truth being denied. ­W hether ­women are commodities, consume commodities to improve their value in sexual se­lection, or repudiate the commercial world of ­women’s sexualization, she argued in 66 

• Chapter One

an ambivalent rage, the only option was to “do away with governments” and to return to the “possibility of communally owned property.”76 Like Minerva taking flight at dusk, He-­Yin, a supremely gifted logician, critic, and polemicist, theorized just at the time when an aspirational Chinese bourgeoisie was on the rise. ­Under ­these conditions, she could not avoid walking into the snare that other advocates have tripped. Are w ­ omen ab77 jects or subjects?

Rethinking Conditions of Thought and the Event of ­Women The extranational area of the treaty port and the forcefully installed corporate cap­i­tal­ist markets did suture together a rough totality. Rapidly spreading financializing and privatizing corporate marketing systems, however, turned national insignia into branding fantasies, since in the case of the Chinese mainland, no v­ iable nation-­state could forcefully brand the nation as such. The strange advertisement in figure 1.52 conveys the dilemma. The Jintan general, a national brand for Jintan and for Japan itself, watches over a parade of clown-­like male figures, each carry­ing a shield with the general’s visage and each one branded Chinese. What did the designer intend? I have recently found a photo image of a group of men dressed this way and touting the product (figure 1.53), but that does not explain what the per­for­mance intended. A ­ fter years of thinking about and showing this image, I still do not know. At the very least, it clarifies how corporate imperialist Japa­nese zaibatsu and small commodity companies cashed in on the strong and militarized Japa­nese imperial state. My point is that forces and facts may feel like abstractions, but they are not. On May 27, 1920, the Shanghai Times ran a story ­under the title “A Dual Mishap—­Tram Collides with Motor Car.”78 It concerned a Chinese man who was alleged to have gotten in a verbal fight with foreign passengers on Tramcar No. 175 shortly a­ fter two in the after­noon. When the tram braked on Nanking Road between Chekiang and Fokien Roads, a car carry­ing “a foreign occupant” rear-­ended it. No note was made of the brand, but the car belonged to amco. The person in the car might have been Mrs. Meyer, who had designed the ubiquitous triangular amco brand trademark. The fight took place in a foreign-­produced, machine-­tooled tramcar and involved Shanghailanders, the term foreign residents preferred over imperialists. The news article does not say Conditions of Thinking  •  6 7

1.52  ​Jintan advertisement

showing clown-­like Chinese men holding Jintan general image boards. Shengjing shibao, March 14, 1933. 1.53  ​Photo­graph of the

­actual parade event pictured in the Jintan ad. From Sanger, Advertising Methods in Japan, China, and the Philippines.

­ hether the Chinese man was arrested or w w ­ hether he appeared before a foreign judge in a Shanghai-­based extraterritorial court. This inconsequential nonevent, reported to an English-­language news organ that foreign residents consumed, played out in everyday life all the forces described in the preceding: corporate imperialism, mechanization of mass transportation, treaty-­port Shanghai, cars and car culture, and, indirectly, a professional journalist at a for-­profit venture whose salary was paid in part by amco ads. ­Until forces at play are written into histories of the moment, we risk historicism, idealist repre­sen­ta­tions, and claims that effectively paper over ruptures, novelty, voluntarism, and our own capacity to act.

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Everyday life and massive po­liti­cal economic changes are inseparable; for me, they are latent in ephemera. Known historical actors like Meyer and He-­Yin, writing at the moment Meyer founded amco, situated philosophy and machines and ideologies in the self-­same framework. Hilferding, Wagel, Edkins, He-­Yin, and the o­ thers belong together in the ­f uture anterior ­because they envisioned society, each from their own disparate horizon. The ge light-­bulb girl and the Jintan desk-­lamp girl are epistemological twins, residing in a commodity world linking female physiological bodies to theories about life in society. They are pre­sent or are, as Benjamin put it, latently caught in the amber of the past, for us to blast awry and to reanimate. It is not for me to declare how the logics of a world are; theorists of a past day are reliable-­enough sources at this point. Theorists illuminate the conditions and logics as they w ­ ere barely intuiting the new t­ hings entering the world, flashing out danger that they, not wholly comprehending, nonetheless declared. An event is a po­liti­cally inspired action to install a newly discovered truth. He-­Yin was among the first to anticipate the possibilities emerging in her era and to install that truth po­liti­cally. In fact, truths ­ripple through po­liti­cal communities, instigating acts of vari­ous kinds. Anticipating in her theoretical work the po­liti­cal conditions for militancy she felt ­were latent in her moment, she po­liti­cally planned to act on her sexual difference, to be an avatar for other ­women becoming conscious about their compromised position in feudal and cap­i­tal­ist patriarchy. The rise of the commodity-­girl icon in commercial advertising would confirm He-­Yin’s anticipation: her anarchist po­liti­cal position is cruel and accurate. Anarchists w ­ ere repelled by the conditions that would make their subjective lives pos­si­ble and their personal ruination probable. Philosophically, He-­Yin recognized that ­under cap­i­ tal­ist conditions, the ethical, even the so­cio­log­i­cal, question of ­women’s autonomous, willed, erotic, and social lives is thinkable, and yet it had not arrived with a mandated subject. Even if patriarchy was extinguished overnight, w ­ omen would still remain problematic b­ ecause their natu­ ral rights remained latent. In contrast, when latency is po­liti­cally transformed into militancy, the militant may still lose the strug­gle, ­because the conditions that animate militants—­He-­Yin and Jiang Qing come to mind—­also give rise to the modern girl, the commodity girl, and bourgeois w ­ omen, to slaves, masochists, and whores. According to He-­Yin, sellouts misrecognize what and who they truly are and willfully degrade

Conditions of Thinking  •  6 9

themselves socially. Though anarchist philosophy barely predated full-­ blown commodity culture and the steep rise of the advertising industry, He-­Yin’s foresight anticipated the contradictions t­ hese social conditions would bring to thinking about new truths. As early as 1900, the strug­gle over the event of ­women had begun.

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Chapter Two

Foundational Chinese Sociology

Chinese modern thought is overwhelmingly convinced that h­ umans live in socie­ties. The conditions of thinking sketched out in the previous chapter also situated social phi­los­o­phers’ commitment to the categorical imperative under­lying intellectual revolution: all beings live in society, and I do, too, but society robs me of my natu­ral rights. The bat business model sent so­c io­l og­i­c al agents to collect information and turn villages into consumer socie­ties for smoking rolled tobacco, which makes marketing into innovative social theory in the sense that it rationalizes ­human ­labor to anticipate profit or surpluses. As variously positioned as they ­were, He-­Yin Zhen, Rudolf Hilferding, Srinivas Ram Wagel, and Vilhelm Meyer shared this so­cio­log­i­cal outlook. Li Da and Qu Qiubai’s calling asked them to explain how our group-­oriented species evolves socially and how establishing social justice is congruent with biosocial evolution. Chapter 3 considers other social theorists. But while all shared the social logic that Qu and particularly Li developed philosophically, Chinese Marxism has a po­liti­cal impulse to install the truth of ­women’s humanity at the heart of h­ uman science. If the truth of humanity is sexual difference, in the event of ­women po­liti­cal acts make revolutionary sense of what truth has revealed to us moderns.1 And ­these phi­los­o­phers are modernist in the cosmopolitan sense. Initially, for instance, Li Da intensively read Gabriel Tarde, Georg Simmel, and Franklin Henry Giddings, as well as Wilhelm Wundt and

Charles A. Ellwood, before moving into the socialist camp. Li’s mature work still embraced emotion’s importance but packed zoology and sexual difference into Marxist exegesis, where he found explanations—­sexual se­lection and psychosexuality—­for h­ uman natu­ral and social origins. Qu Qiubai died before he had an opportunity to revisit his early preoccupation with sexual difference. But we know from vari­ous sources that Qu’s commitment to August Bebel’s sex theory was unchanging. Qu’s other significance in this chapter is his thesis on language and repre­sen­ta­tion ­because, like He-­Yin Zhen, he felt language had to accommodate and subsume real­ity, including sexual differentiation. He wanted mimesis, the presupposition that language represents truth b­ ecause it reflects a realistic or mirror image of the “objective” world. Mimetic prose sustains the self-­evidence of the social in the social sciences.2 Difference turns out to be a truth, part of our mammal nature. But justice, denied or fulfilled, demanded that new truth be embraced. He-­Yin never moved beyond a painful ambivalence regarding w ­ omen’s natu­ral rights in relation to ­women’s social responsibilities, although she took the truth of physiology and society as givens. So did the new corporate imperialists and their social science of commodity advertising. All of ­these theories rest on a reification of communicable, mimetic new truths, society and life.3

Sociology and Intellectual Revolution Once upon a time, Chinese ­people had believed in an epistemology that situated ­humans between the heavens and the earth. It took sixty years of translation and debate to dislodge this ontology. In its place, intellectuals established a newer “real truth,” that h­ uman beings had actually just dreamed up the old triadic epistemology. It was a wrong ideology or false apprehension of real­ity, according to sociologists, ­because all ­people, including Chinese ­people, actually live in society. Society is categorically universal ­because ­human life, no ­matter how barbaric or sophisticated, cannot survive in its absence, yet socie­ties all have dif­fer­ent cultures. Culture is the way that social beings understand themselves and their habitat. Th ­ ese are sociology’s basic truths. Given the magnitude of ­these claims, relatively l­ ittle has been written in Eu­rope or the United States about the role of ­human and social science in Chinese intellectual life. In the P ­ eople’s Republic, however, academic intellectuals are definite about the ideological revolution. Histories of sociology include Yang 72 

• Chapter Two

Yabin’s three-­volume, comprehensive Zhongguo shehuixue shi (History of Chinese sociology), documenting disciplinary sociology in Chinese universities before the state suspended formal “bourgeois” disciplines. Yan Ming’s 2004 history of Chinese treaty-­port sociology departments tracked the influence of U.S. pioneers in China like Robert Kulp and Sidney D. ­Gamble, Clarence G. Dittmer and Edward C. Hayes, and their Chinese disciples. Yan’s survey also reviewed Christian-­inspired social surveys in early twentieth-­century institutions like the Young Men’s Christian Association (ymca), Princeton-­in-­Peking, Yanjing University, and Peking Union Medical College, as well as departments in the modern new university system Christians helped to set up and finance. This is not to say that foreign machinations caused a national intellectual revolution. Generations of Qing exam-­system trainees and successful scholar-­ officials had long been agitating to reform examination criteria. During the National Revolutionary movement that culminated in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, many Chinese institutional players—­including provincial power holders, reform-­minded local elites or gentry, Christian churches, business concerns, and so on—­agitated for new schools. Before the Qing administration abolished its formal exam system, local power holders and government officials tried all kinds of methods to attract intellectually able youth into po­liti­cal ser­v ice. Tsing­hua and Peking Universities ­were the consequence of de­cades of local agitation, the Qing state’s weakness in relation to the imperial powers, and a general frustration among educated ­people about schooling. Between 1901 and 1919, major national postsecondary schools, in theory Chinese owned, responded to mandates from big international players like Theodore Roo­se­velt’s Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program, the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, and other foundations. Yung-­Chen Chiang’s 2001 Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949, establishes two significant facts: missionary organ­izations spearheaded institutional reform and gradu­ates from U.S.-­ style sociology departments in par­tic­u­lar moved into Nationalist Party social engineering proj­ects.4 More recently, Yao Chun’an’s remarkable critical research, expanded with a preface by fellow historian of sociology Sang Bing, evaluated China-­based research since the 1980s. Both stress how historians strug­ gled to figure out what the discipline of sociology was in the early twentieth c­ entury and what kind of logic structured its philosophical burden and core assumptions.5 Yao’s book is particularly valuable ­because it distinguishes, for instance, what a discipline is or means, how the strug­gle to Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  7 3

define sociology in relation to other social or h­ uman sciences like anthropology and ethnology took place, and to what degree the philosophical content of Chinese sociology is Eu­ro­pean and American philosophy mediated through secondary sources in Japa­nese. It also pre­sents a “history of the pre­sent” for sociology in China t­ oday.6 Qu and Li excelled in the old and the new education. Most intellectuals coming to national prominence in the 1920s knew the scholastic tradition and spent their lifetimes negotiating intellectual revaluation. Some became “New Confucians”; ­o thers sought to reconcile old aesthetic and knowledge systems with Kantian aesthetics and natu­ ral teleology, for instance; and still o­ thers, such as Qu, sought to overthrow and destroy an amorphous new entity they bundled u­ nder terms like feudalism, tradition, and Confucianism.7 Yet when educated Chinese translated or discussed new philosophical categories and ideas, it was not just in relation to their local origins but in relation to long-­unsettled intellectual dilemmas in Eu­rope and the United States, too. No one had a lock on categories of modernity, realism in scientific repre­sen­ta­tion, or sexual difference, which means Qu and Li ­were translating prob­lems, not solutions; theories, not foundations of scientific socialism; and contradictions that modernist intellectuals on a global scale ­were confronting. A good example of how this double problematic worked is Yan Fu, the ­father of Chinese sociology. Yan reposed the question of why bees have socie­t ies but do not evolve socially. Why do only h­ umans appear to have thrown off physical and psychic constraints and evolved naturally and socially? He noted that in the beehive physical bodies do not change, and the hive is an overly specialized and static society. Yan anticipated so­cio­log­i­cal studies in China before their consolidation into formal disciplines. Like He-­Yin Zhen, Yan was a polymath and had both a conventional Qing education and an avant-­garde course in “Western learning” (algebra, arithmetic, astrology, chemistry, En­glish, geometry, navigation, physics, and trigonometry) before becoming nationally significant. Intellectuals in Qu Qiubai, Li Da, and Mao Zedong’s generation read Yan’s pathbreaking, eccentric, interpretive translations of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology. Yan opened what became a century-­long argument over ­human evolution and the social role of communications, tool making, organ­ization, class hierarchies, and ways of organ­izing ­human life. He was prescient in 74 

• Chapter Two

the sense that he believed ­humans evolved like plants and that ­humans, like plants, left sympodes, or irregular zigzag growth patterns.8 He was better educated than U.S. sociologist Lester Ward (1841–1913), but he laid the ground for next-­generation Chinese intellectuals who then read Ward’s influential lecture “Evolution in the Vegetable Kingdom.” In this multiply translated lecture, Ward noted that, like the evolution of vegetables, ­human evolution consisted of a crisscross unfolding of inherent evolutionary possibilities; this is a general logic of the sympode. The instructive difference for Ward is that vegetables lack self-­awareness and thus have no society. Vegetable evolution suggests that we ­humans have evolved as we have ­because we have the capacity to communicate within our species. A sympodial h­ uman society, say a primitive tribe, is an offshoot and may be devolving, but ­human socie­ties ­will devolve or evolve ­because ­humans are beasts with a species-­being highly evolved in its capacity to draw on unconscious drives, conscious emotions, mass emotions, individual motivations, criminal impulses, and so on, to mediate between nature and culture, or between physical inheritance and social development. That is why, according to Ward, the social scientist and specifically the sociologist must disaggregate social and natu­ral ­factors using intermediary ideas like social psy­chol­ogy. Yan’s translation proj­ect, like younger generation intellectuals’ obsession with Lester Ward, is an urbane version of evolutionary philosophy, launched in an already fertile field. By the 1830s, Chinese scholars ­were collecting information about Eu­rope, obtained primarily from Christian missionaries. The most famous example is Lin Zexu’s (1785–1850) 1846 acquisition of Abraham Rees’s (1743–1825) Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Lit­er­a­ture, published in 1819–1821, and his 1834 acquisition of An Encyclopaedia of Geography by Hugh Murray (1789–1846), which Lin ordered translated.9 By the first de­cade of the twentieth ­century, a generic “encyclopedic dictionary” came into circulation among Chinese readers, rooted in the technique of the German taxonomist Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus and the Chambers ­Brothers’ pioneering 1857 genre of the “­people’s encyclopedia” showing ordinary readers the branches of knowledge that the ­people most desired and used. Although, historians point out, the Chinese world of letters had had its own massive information-­processing and taxonomy systems since the early 1770s, the Western encyclopedia movement transformed, not so much the content of information as such, but knowledge’s bound­aries— by including physical, chemical, and natu­ral sciences and highlighting Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  7 5

new, dif­fer­ent categories. Data got shifted from the older leishu (Chinese encyclopedic) order to an alphabetic or phonetic retrieval system that filed new data according to scientific formulas.10 As early as 1902, a foundation situated theorization of society, sociology, social logics, and the situation of physiological or gender relations in evolution. The encyclopedia movement justified the Guangxu or Qing Reforms and consolidated the position of politicians like Kang Youwei, who sought conservative change and a constitutional monarchy on the model of the Japa­nese Meiji Restoration. The compilation, translation, and innovation that resulted from the influx of European-­style Chinese encyclopedias merged to become, in the end, what Milena Dolezelova-­ Velingerova and Rudolf G. Wagner call a “modernization package.”11 What they mean is that information was codified into a general framework where specifics reinforced generalizations. For instance, by 1855 educated Chinese readers could know that the mature h­ uman body has 206 bones, not 360. Philosophically, a number has no meaning u­ ntil the life sciences of physiology demonstrate how the living body is born with 270 bones and over the life cycle fuses bones, activates glands, floods the gonads with sex hormones, and motivates the drive to sexual procreation. Actually, it turns out, the “fact” of 206 bones is intimately related to the theory of ­human physiological evolution. Building on this relation took time, particularly ­because the earliest translators and commentators ­were largely producing newfangled source materials for Chinese diplomats stationed abroad. The diffusion of systematized information from Western knowledge sources (­later a massive inflow of Japanese-­inflected and translated social science) inserted the concept of modernization into the intellectual world of all Chinese elites. On the basis of ­these massive publication events, Liang Qichao and his cohort could build cheaper and friendlier distribution media and advocate for newspaper publication to transmit the modernization concepts and teleology. Following the failure of the constitutional-­monarchy movement in 1898, many educated ­people awakened to the philosophical dimension of Eu­ro­pean learning. Intellectuals like Kang had not fully investigated key extra-­Confucian philosophical terms (such as sympode). Also, at a certain point, advanced Chinese intellectuals realized that Spencerian social and natu­ral evolutionary theory lacked explanations for h­ uman intentionality and rationality, or ­will and emotion. This insight led social scientists like the psychologist Pan Guangdan, two de­cades ­later, to embrace a version of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Pan, whom I discuss in more detail in 76 

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chapter 5, worked ­under the assumption that the liberation of individual and mass sexual energy freed ­people to make intentionally good reproductive choices that unintentionally forwarded eugenic evolutionary development. Like Sigmund Freud, his major influence, Pan knew that considering h­ umans to be “social animals” meant phi­los­o­phers, prac­ti­ tion­ers, and analysts would have to reassess and recognize the entangled social and mammal mixture in p­ eople. Chinese intellectuals educated in China, Eu­rope, or Japan ­were engaging with this conundrum, which lies at the heart of Spencer, Huxley, Charles Darwin, and ­others’ theories: the social and natu­ral sciences obey the same scientific laws but are distinct, though entangled, domains of real­ity.12 Nonetheless, even as late as 1902, Chinese editors, publishers, academics, translators, and diplomats had “­little sense of something now called ‘society.’ ”13 In his intellectual history of Yan Fu and Nakamura Keiu’s foundational translation of Mill, historian Douglas Howland found a pattern in the philosophical awareness of translators and interpreters of early social science into Japa­nese, too. Saito Tsuyoshi, for instance, exhibited almost no comprehension of “society” in his Spencer translation. The founder of the Marxist tradition in Japan and a pan-­A sian intellectual force, Nakamura Keiu (Nakamana Masano, 1832–1891), who was Li Da’s teacher, remained “without an expression for ‘society,’ ” which, Howland points out, l­ imited what Nakamura’s translation of Mill’s On Liberty could express. Howland takes pains to say that Nakamura did not mistranslate or actively misconstrue Mill. Neither did Yan. Requiring a stable calque (new word or neologism) for “society” l­ imited Nakamura’s philosophical compass, and making a calque to cogently express a concept is extremely difficult. “An abstraction like society is, a­ fter all,” Howland writes, “a difficult concept in any language.”14 Wang Rongbao (1878–1933) and Ye Lan’s (1875–­?) Xin Erya (New Erya), a text aimed at the high school market, defined key terms, or historical catachreses, or philosophical calques, that ­were restructuring twentieth-­century Chinese thought. Wang and Ye w ­ ere familiar with ­earlier Chinese and Japa­nese encyclopedia collections, but their volume is more declarative. Among the terms defined are society (in both proposed calques, qun and shehui), economy, law, physiology, logic, and natu­ral science. New Erya defines society as follows (paraphrased): When more than two persons live together, that body is called a qun (group) or a shehui (society). ­Those who do research on qun rationality or laws are called qun-­ologists or sociologists.15 ­These specialists share the same Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  7 7

object of study. The content of the object of knowledge, intrinsic or extrinsic, is considered as a question in such research. The object of study for sociology is the qun/shehui, and sociology is all about group or so­cio­log­i­cal prob­lems. ­There are many dif­fer­ent methods appropriate to this study, but two are basic, the empirical rational strategy and the experiential or inductive logic. All kinds of methods are appropriate to t­ hese two modes of research.16 This clear but circular definition says that ­humans require specialist knowledge in order to understand themselves in their social relations. It continues on in declarative sentences to outline distinctions in so­cio­log­i­ cal research: the qualitative and quantitative methods, the inferential and the deductive modes, idealism and imagination, statistics, and so on. The point of ­these vari­ous studies is to extract the wuzhi lifa (the log­os of ­things) from the social world. To do so requires objectivity and subjective appreciation for the manifold objective world or shishi (real­ity). New Erya explains how sociologists become self-­aware, become conscious or self-­conscious, which allows the investigator to be open to the princi­ple of objectivity. In other words, social science logic sets off a pro­cess for the study of society that requires a shifting relationship between the investigator and the investigated. The implication seems to be that ziwo zhijue (self-­awareness) occurs as one is ­doing sociology. Indeed, sociology and the log­os of ­things lead t­ oward socialism, and communism is the natu­ral outcome, ­because this natu­ral and social pro­cess of self-­realization makes it pos­si­ble for actualized sociologists and their readers to throw off oppressive social relationships. The sociology discussion references natu­ral conditions that made pos­si­ble the physical separation of humanity into social groups and categories, the basic laws of the horde. In the past, when men and w ­ omen lived together, they did so ­under conditions of promiscuity, where the ­mother of ­children was known but not the ­father. This condition led eventually to regulation and to the emergence of the jiazu, or kinship group, a “natu­ral” basis of society; but Wang and Ye also do not spare details. In a separate section, they write explic­itly about the sexual relation. In primitive times, unlike the pre­sent, ­humans mated with one another by force of sexual desire and need for gratification. They sexually selected one another. Then vari­ous violent forms of capture emerged, and marriage was instituted, with power shifting from female to male hands, and kin avoidance in marriage was required (incest taboo). This signaled the

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end of the matriarchate and the rise of patriarchalism, or the primary relation of f­ athers and sons. Sexuality drives evolutionary development. Consolidating t­ hese terms has an impact that cannot be overestimated. Wang and Ye set into a ­simple story all of the reductive empiricism of the ­human and natu­ral sciences. Their origin story includes the natu­ral genesis of primitive humanity and the social world of the species-­being. It does not distinguish the origins of Homo erectus or protohumans from the concept of h­ umans as social animals; t­ hese two theories merge into one set of maxims. The key is how primitive sexual intercourse drove social animals into groups or socie­ties. The authors of New Erya, published first in 1903, had studied the Darwinian argument about the ascent of humanity and no doubt knew the social evolutionary debate over the direct ape-­to-­human theory that Huxley and Richard Owen steered a­ fter Darwin’s studies ­were published. By 1902, erudites had for the most part accepted even the most distasteful part of Darwinian theory (at least ­until Friedrich Engels, Bebel, and Marxist sociology came up with a more compelling argument about ­labor power): that natu­ral and sexual se­lection was the motive force in h­ uman social and anatomical evolution. This is not random storytelling but an origin philosophy that proposes the mammal and social evolution of all h­ umans, not just one clan or state or tribe or race. In this regard, Wang and Ye consolidated among other key terms a conceptual real­ity, society, which would stand no m ­ atter what Chinese word eventually got assigned to it. Once conceptualized, society is an irrefutable fact, a concrete abstract. It is a first symptom in the larger movement t­ oward the social scientization of Chinese modern thought. Yan Fu and Zhang Taiyan had scholarly reasons for preferring the qunxue (the study of qun), and Yan tried hard to express his understanding of Mill’s On Liberty. Yan was steeped in British debates over social evolution, individualism, social logic, and the sociology of utilitarian value. Unlike the subsequent generation, Yan read and wrote En­glish and had lived and studied in ­England. He never aligned with younger p­ eople in Japan struggling over which Chinese word best described social logics and philosophy, and po­liti­cally he ended up in the royalist camp. ­Later intellectuals came to understand Enlightenment so­cio­log­ic­ al philosophy as a package. In the end, the Sino-­Japanese term shehuixue (sociology) became standard, and translations of Meiji-­and Showa-­era social science interpretations flooded the Chinese media market. Wang and Ye

Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  7 9

had demonstrated that the name was less significant than the categorical, society. When thought is social-­scientized, the term society arrives with unanticipated prob­lems. Most fundamentally, the logic of social science philosophy is repre­sen­ta­tional, rooted in theories of mimesis. The premise of mimetic scientific exposition à la Francis Bacon is that, of the ­human sciences, sociology most accurately represents material, social, and natu­ ral ­human real­ity. This Baconian stance is obvious in a polemic that Liang Qichao wrote, in which he argued that Chinese p­ eople’s inability to think beyond the monarchy had hindered China’s social-­cultural evolution. In his view, Chinese ­people w ­ ere literally blinded to real­ity ­because they did not think scientifically.17 Liang was no sociologist, but his insight was prophetic. He argued on the basis of his own rationale that pre-­social-­ scientized intellectuals failed to discern that h­ umans do not live “­under heaven” but rather exist together in an objective platform or structure called society, where as individuals and citizens they accept or repudiate social contracts. Society and the science of society, sociology, according to Liang and the Chinese vernacular sociology that would follow him, enable us to see real­ity beneath our illusory thoughts. We can fi­nally, Yan Fu had suggested, grasp the objective realities of our natu­ral evolution and our h­ uman natures.18 The presupposition of real­ity and realism flowered philosophically and critically in the development of Chinese dialectical materialist philosophy and Marxist sociology. In other words, one need not fetishize the individual scholarly debates that created, debated, or circulated social science neologisms, ­because the conditions for thinking w ­ ere so much larger than the efforts of any one intellectual, even any one ­giant, and the general conditions for thought ­were, by the turn of the ­century, so deeply unsettled. Sociology is a way of thinking in an Enlightenment or scientific or social scientific tradition where society, as Liang observed, is the scientifically presumptive condition of ­human existence.

Critical Social Theory and Sexual Difference Young social theorists Qu Qiubai and Li Da began their ­careers translating major texts directly addressing sexual difference. In Qu’s time, international debates pivoted around sexual se­lection, evolution, and individual choice; natu­ral scientific determinism; and social scientific voluntarism. The mother-­right debate, for instance, asked how humanity had 80 

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evolved so quickly into highly differentiated l­ abor power with oppressive social relations that trapped female ­humans in humiliating social degradation. Arguments about sex difference and the origins of society w ­ ere so intense that most Eu­ro­pean phi­los­o­phers had something to say about social versus natu­ral essence. What we consider the international socialist heritage was part and parcel of high philosophical debates among Schopenhauer, Mill, Kant, Huxley, Freud, Wundt, Tarde, Spencer, Ernst Haekel, Thorstein Veblen, Mill, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, René Descartes, and Baruch Spinoza. Thus, Qu and Li entered existing discussions over evolutionary temporality, sociality, physiology, and the relation of social evolution and species evolution amid this disagreement over real­ity and language. Qu rendered into Chinese a Rus­sian translation of Bebel’s German version of ­Women and Socialism. Li brought into Chinese a 1904 Japa­nese translation of American sociologist Lester Ward’s famous statement in Pure Sociology, “The Gynæcocentric Theory.”19 With t­ hese actions, each entered the debate over female-­centered primitive society. As Gong Yanhong and Liu Shipeng have established in a comparative study on Li and Qu, both men w ­ ere trying to analyze the fact of h­ uman sexual difference. Gong and Liu write that Li was struck by the Kantian argument that a true social individual is both sexes, male and female. That is a philosophical observation that reinforces the scientific fact that it takes ovum and sperm to create a h­ uman fetus. Society is thus “the world of male sex and female sex participating together.”20 Gong and Liu also summarize the position that Qu took, which is fundamentally a mix of Bebel’s ­Women and Socialism and Engels’s The Origin of the F ­ amily, Private Prop21 erty and the State. Both Chinese sociologists began from sexual division, physiologically in reproductive biology and in relation to social forms. Each was also embroiled in positions other Chinese intellectuals ­were contesting, but that discussion is deferred for the moment, b­ ecause when translators read Bebel, Ward, or Havelock Ellis, they ­were accessing the breadth of Eu­ ro­pean social science philosophy.22 And perhaps even more impor­tant, Chinese intellectuals ­were caught up in the same debates that wracked Eu­ro­pean social theory. Temporality, sociality, physiology, and the relation of social evolution and species evolution show up in all of ­these intertextual debates. A core question that the physiology of sexual difference imposes is what role sexual difference has played historically. Bebel, the German socialist revolutionary; Ward, the premier American academic Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  8 1

liberal evolutionary sociologist; and Ellis, the British founder of social sexuality studies, all became available in Chinese translation from Japa­ nese by 1913, and all fixated on this question. Perhaps it ­w ill eventually be pos­si­ble to demonstrate that the Chinese debates placed relatively more stress on female voluntarism and ­women’s centrality to social development—­more, that is, than other socialist so­cio­log­i­cal traditions did. That remains to be determined. What is manifest already is that the Chinese debate over society and sexual division assumed that ­woman is the central figure in ­human evolution. In my terms, it means that Qu and Li w ­ ere participants in the event of ­women. Li emphasized Kant’s point that ­human individuals combine male and female. He also read Japa­nese sociology of sexuality, which emphasized w ­ omen’s evolutionary primacy. And given the alleged central real­ity of sexual se­lection, it seemed that h­ uman w ­ omen o­ ught to be choosing their own partners for procreation, as all other mammals did. ­There simply was no alternate position to take given the evolutionary logic and the mammal evidence.23 According to Zhong Shaohua, the early Chinese intellectuals promoting the natu­ral and evolutionary social sciences in the Western learning agenda often misrecognized the central role philosophy played in Western science, technology, and social science.24 Zhong does not mention that social logics in the ­human sciences are rooted in theories of evolution, so ­there ­really is no avoiding the dilemma ­women and sexuality posed. If ­there ­were no other explanation for ­human natu­ral and social evolution than sex itself, then it seems intuitive that better social conditions for ­human sexual se­lection would accelerate evolutionary social development. How was the breeding capacity of h­ uman mammals reflected in or integrated into the social evolutionary f­ actors that propel the species forward? What happened in the long-­term pro­cesses of sociobiological species evolution when w ­ omen’s range of activities was severely constricted? How could females not contribute equally to evolutionary development when each sex contributed ge­ne­tic material to sociobiological pro­gress? As the New Culture Movement began its focus on philosophy and theoretical technologies that e­ arlier entrée points had ignored, the role of mammal relations in social evolution became a starker prob­lem. Atop a churning theoretical crisis over social theory and the log­os of sociology, early twentieth-­century Chinese scholars, strategists, po­liti­ cal theorists, and government officials implemented eugenic population control, gender and social development policy, and theories of history 82 

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that began with the assumption of matrilineality. ­Women’s liberation took a role in all theories of civilizational stages that arose on the basis of natu­ral science. In other words, in the h­ uman and natu­ral scientific revolutions among Chinese intellectuals, a ­women’s revolt or liberation movement had evolutionary predicates and implications. The assumption was that a feminist uprising has a forward or progressive role to play in social, mammalian evolution. It is consequently impor­tant to see as clearly as pos­si­ble the foundations—­f undamental philosophical assumptions—­revolutionary phi­los­o­phers made then. Ensuring ­women’s social liberation has been, for better and for worse, an article of faith in socialist traditions, and the po­liti­cal implications of historical materialist ideas require explanation.

Qu Qiubai: Sexual Difference and Scientific Mimesis Qu Qiubai introduced historical materialist philosophy into Chinese debates. He was also a theorist of translation working to establish a social scientific language rooted in the promise of mimesis. He presumed with ­others in Eu­rope and elsewhere that a mimetic or repre­sen­ta­tional language was necessary to give Chinese intellectuals and ordinary readers access to real­ity. Qu grew up in an intellectual culture already familiar with botany, anatomy, the evolutionary study of flora and fauna, the encyclopedic array of technical and scientific information, and the formalization of so­cio­log­i­cal categories à la the New Erya. In 1919, however, the twenty-­year-­old Qu Qiubai and his fellow Rus­sianist Geng Jizhi (1899–1937) joined up with polymath Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958), ­later educated at Columbia and Yanjing Universities; Xu Dishan (1894–1941), who was educated at Yanjing, Columbia, and Oxford Universities and became a religious scholar; and Qu Shiying (1900–1976), a translator who would obtain a PhD in education from Harvard and join the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Movement in ­later years. Given his manifest talent, Qu had a second-­tier education compared to his peers, and yet he mastered Rus­sian and achieved competency in French and En­glish. Together, ­these gifted intellectuals founded the journal Xin shehui (New society) u­ nder the auspices of the Social Progressive Association and started bringing into Chinese the names and basic ideas of Eu­ro­pean and American sociologists like Tarde, Simmel, and Charles-­Marie Gustave Le Bon on the masses and Ward, Giddings, and Charles A. Ellwood Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  8 3

on social dynamics. ­After Xin qingnian (New youth), Xin shehui was the second most influential journal of ideas during the 1920s.25 This intellectual cohort focused on the social implications of translation and philosophy of translation. Qu’s contribution stands out b­ ecause he voiced early concerns about China’s written language, Han graphemes (or logographs or hanzi). He concluded that the Chinese written language had been culturally corrupted. His short scholarly life (he became a full-­time Communist Party translator and activist) focused on changing the Chinese written script to make it, in his view, capable of accurately representing material, social, and natu­ral h­ uman real­ity, including the core relation of the sexes. He took a leadership position in the Communist Party, proved completely inept, and was eventually captured and shot to death by the Nationalist government in 1935 at the age of thirty-­six. Among his first essays, “Zhishi shi zangwu” (Knowledge is stolen goods) begins with the question, “What is zhishi [knowledge]?” Addressing his own rhetorical question, Qu argued that zhishi in its written form inverted class moralism and knowledge of the real. This led to a catastrophic notion in current linguistic norms, that a Chinese person with no knowledge is a moral “inanimate” (muou shixiang). Obversely, moralistic Chinese obscured what social scientific log­os clarifies to be true. Qu was the first Russian-­competent, left-­w ing Chinese intellectual to study Rus­sian in the USSR. Among his other duties ­after returning to China in 1923 was setting up a sociology department at Shanghai University ­under the umbrella of the two major competing po­liti­cal parties (on the left the Chinese Communist Party and on the right the Nationalist Party) u­ nder the USSR-­sponsored First United Front (1922–1927).26 Although he spent inordinate amounts of time translating party communication, his university assignment meant he created social theory himself and taught curricula in the new Sociology Department and burst onto an already roiling debate over modern Chinese textuality with other intellectual leaders of his day. ­These included Liang Shiqiu (1903–1987), Fu Sinian (1896–1950), and the f­ ather of Chinese modern lit­er­a­ture, Lu Xun (1881–1936). Lu and Fu took the position that the Chinese language could be transformed and improved in the pro­cess of translation ­because bringing linguistic change, that is, ideas from the world, would shift its matrix, allowing for the systematizing, stabilizing, and regularizing of a written language that could be read aloud in mass media and would provide a satisfyingly literary alternative to inherited genres. In Qu’s case, 84 

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the ideal written language could mimetically represent the social as such, starting with the question of sexual difference. Th ­ ese aspirations placed Qu firmly in the camp of ­those who agonistically strug­gled with a tension in origin stories between natu­ral science and social science. Qu embraced an Engelsian version of dialectical materialism that stressed “a material real­ity subject to the laws of dialectics, and of practice as the kernel of a correct epistemology,” views l­ater reinforced in the philosophies of Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Li Da, and Mao Zedong.27 It meant grasping the origins of materialist philosophy in the Greco-­Roman, Eu­ro­pean tradition and developing po­liti­cal strategies based on this alleged materialist real­ity. Absorbing Plekhanov required valorizing the real. In his writing on sociology and social revolution, Qu wavered, as historians have pointed out, over the question of the superstructure (read: society) in the same basic way that Rus­sian Marxist phi­los­o­phers Plekhanov, Lenin, Abram Deborin, Mark Borisovich Mitin, Leon Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin did. Qu seemed, in the end, to think that Marxist dialectical materialism was “a determinist, [though] not a fatalist, theory” and mobilized his poetic imagination and powers of invective against the Chinese language, which to him propped up a culture of decrepit obfuscation.28 He appeared to assume that the prevailing Rus­sian orthodoxies and his own scholarly tendencies coincided and that the socially or­ga­nized h­ uman had the capacity to force social change. On the one hand, this made him pessimistic and reckless; on the other, apparently b­ ecause he agonistically devalued the beautiful Chinese literary heritage, his voluntarism and openness to cultural revolution ­were wildly optimistic and presumed that such a transformation of thinking and written expression was pos­si­ble.29 As a consequence of coming so early to explicit Marxist debate, and of his own intellectual orientation, Qu’s Marxism was a philosophical version of sophisticated global h­ uman sciences. Moreover, a core prob­lem par­tic­u­lar to his circumstances was not one generally scrutinized in social theory elsewhere. The question he spent his last years engaged with polemically and philosophically was why the Chinese symbolic written system had preoriginated and then claustrophobically subjugated mass speech to itself. This is the inverse of the question raised above: How can the Chinese written script be forced into mimesis? Qu’s affirmative question became, Can Chinese revolutionary intellectuals collaborate with the masses to create a written language capable of voicing the real­ ity of social life and, thus, the p­ eople’s real social conditions? As already Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  8 5

mentioned, his discussion was part of the larger debate over the relative autonomy of the superstructure and resurfaces in the work of Li Da, who lived longer and was more productive in a scholarly sense. But during Qu’s final under­ground Shanghai years, working with Lu Xun and for a time advising on Mao Zedong’s experimental cultural revolutions during the Jiangxi Soviet period of 1931–1934, Qu recommended the revolutionary overthrow of previous Chinese worldviews and written languages so that a language of realism, a real language that described real social realities, could be forged, a language that illiterates could comprehend when it was read aloud to them. In a late essay, “Marx, Engels and the Literary Realism” (Makesi, engesi yu wenxue xianshi zhuyi), Qu argued that Marx and Engels advocated literary realism b­ ecause it reflected society; thus lit­er­a­ture could represent real­ity.30 Quoting Engels’s letter to the En­glish writer Margaret Harkness in which Engels praises Honoré de Balzac, calling his literary realism “a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘society,’ ” Qu noted that Engels and Marx ­were not opposed to literary realism per se but only lit­er­a­ture that distorted real­ity, “paraded around selfish individuals,” and “raped logic [qiangjian luoji].”31 In any case, he reasoned with Engels, ­there ­were two Balzacs: one was a realist writer and the other the darling of the French establishment intellectuals. Qu joined what he saw as Engels’s anti-­identitarian position, meaning Balzac could not be classified or dismissed as a bourgeois writer or a Catholic writer, nor any other situated partiality, ­because he was a ­great realist universalist (yuzhouguan). Balzac was a writer with the mind of a sociologist.32 His claim that Balzac could see around personal perspective and write a universal language parallels Qu’s per­sis­tent interest in real sexual difference. Among his earliest works, mixed into Rus­sian realist novel translations, are his articles “­Women at the Center of the Proletarian Movement,” “A Teensy Question: W ­ omen’s Liberation” (Xiaoxiao yige wenti—­funü jiefang de wenti), and “Goodbye to W ­ omen’s Lit­er­a­ture” (Gaobie funü wenxue), published in his own journal and o­ thers, like Liberation and Reform, and Debates of ­Women. It would seem Qu embraced theories of sexual difference without equivocation: his conditions for thinking and capacity for invention, mashed together mimetic repre­sen­ta­tion, physiological and social scientific truths, to conclude that in truth ­women are embodied, socially oppressed natu­ral ­humans. Qu sought to describe social prob­lems truthfully. That is why we see him agonistically struggling with hanzi like nüzi, one of three major Chinese 86 

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words corresponding to the En­glish noun ­woman. He read Rus­sian novels in part to expand his vocabulary, but it is said that he chose this route to fluency b­ ecause the novels gave him insight into the universal social incarceration of ­women. Qu sought to answer the question, What is the fundamental origin of ­women’s oppression? But his work includes an additional dimension. Qu advocates Bebel’s position not just ­because ­women’s liberation means that w ­ omen are analogous to the proletariat in social real­ity but also b­ ecause a revolution undertaken in the name of social real­ity w ­ ill show the truth of sexual difference and the joint contribution of both sexes to social and species evolution. It is simply physiologically not accurate that w ­ omen are inferior to men!33 According to Chen Tiejian, Qu was rare in the depth of his commitment to the question of ­women’s oppression and to finding in Bebel the fundamental evolutionary and social reasons for w ­ omen’s apparent uni34 versal oppression. It helps, therefore, to know what Bebel was promoting as truth. To Bebel, w ­ omen and the proletariat are the most socially oppressed in modern or bourgeois society—­and the female even more so than the working class. Drawing on a mixture of Henry Lewis Morgan’s anthropology and Engels’s and Johann Jakob Bachofen’s theory of the rise of patriarchy and private property ­after the prolonged primitive matriarchate and the subsequent enslavement of all ­women by propertied men, Bebel showed that ­women’s apparent social backwardness was in fact a social evolutionary productive contradiction. By objectifying ­women and making them property, men obscured w ­ omen’s zoological nature, meaning w ­ omen’s responsibility to sexually select male inseminators, and forced w ­ omen (and men) into social devolution. In Bebel’s naturalistic scientific view, sexual desire and sexual intercourse are mammal activities and have supported the social evolution of ­humans to this point. Bebel’s most aggressively argued version of his thesis is in chapter 7 of ­Women and Socialism, “­Woman as a Sex Being—­the Sexual Impulse,” which shows Bebel deeply involved in the effort to distinguish natu­ral and social science: Of all the natu­ral desires that are a part of ­human life, beside the desire for food in order to live, the sexual desire is strongest. The impulse of race preservation is the most power­ful expression of the “­w ill to live.” This impulse is deeply implanted in ­every normally developed ­human being, and upon attaining maturity its satisfaction is essential to physical and m ­ ental welfare. . . . ​The so-­called animal instincts are not inferior to Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  8 7

­ ental requirements. Both are products of the same organism and are m mutually interdependent. This applies to both man and w ­ oman. Hence it follows that knowledge of the nature of the sexual organs is as necessary as that of all other organs, and that the same attention should be bestowed upon their care. We o­ ught to know that organs and impulses implanted in e­ very ­human being constitute a very impor­tant part of our existence, that they as a ­matter of fact predominate during certain periods of life, and that therefore they must not be objects of secrecy, false shame and complete ignorance. It follows furthermore that among both men and ­women knowledge of the physiology and anatomy of the vari­ ous organs and their functions should be as widely diffused as any other branch of ­human knowledge. . . . ​[W]e decry knowledge pertaining to ­those m ­ atters that are most closely linked with our own “ego” and are at the bottom of all social development.35

On the question of bridge-­building between natu­ral physiology and social development, Bebel cites Mill and Kant. The first stated that marriage was a ­legal form of enslavement, and the second, as noted ­earlier, that the full ­human is a fused man and ­woman. But Bebel had his own singular positions. As society has progressed, Bebel said, men have evolved to the point where they desire an intellectual partnership in their ­human sexual love. Invoking Schlegel, Bebel claimed that the intent of nature is the intellectual erotic congress of ­women and men in social bonds of marriage, freely entered on the basis of love, intellectual compatibility, and sexual desire.36 (He gave no nonheterosexual option.) Since it is the intent of nature for ­human social action to perfect the social or marital bond, the pro­gress of humanity is not unlike—­and in fact is analogous to—­the evolution of the vegetable kingdom. Echoing Ward, Bebel argued, “The same laws that apply to nature apply to ­human life,” particularly when, in his opinion, “to-­day it is in h­ uman life as in plant life.”37 ­There is always another twist in this tense, long-­enduring argument. According to Bebel, social teleology means class and sex de­pen­dency are progressively resolved. This development must be scientifically true ­because nature is a constant readjustment in an ongoing natu­ral and social pro­gress. That is why one ­will never find an enduring master-­slave dialectic in nature. A pro­cessual understanding of natu­ral evolution is a block against foolish fears that ­women may reverse the current order to avenge themselves and oppress men. Nature is the brake on social oppression in sex 88 

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relations. Social instruction, including sex education, is the way to learn about your nature, but justice and égalité (i.e., equality of difference) are part of natu­ral law. Nature is benign ­because it is not only self-­righting but also subliminally an extension of the potential that h­ umans and all mammal species possess. Anyway, the “men and ­women of ­future society ­will possess far more self-­control and a better knowledge of their own natures, than men and ­women of to-­day,” ­because society ­will (apparently naturally) evolve better education! Bebel ends ­Women and Socialism, “Man should no longer regard himself an exception to natu­ral laws. He should fi­nally strive to recognize the laws under­lying his own thoughts and actions, and should endeavor to live in accordance with t­ hese laws. He w ­ ill eventually learn to arrange his life . . . ​according to the rational princi­ples derived from an understanding of nature. Politics, morals, law . . . ​­w ill be ­shaped according to natu­ral laws. An existence worthy of ­human beings, that mankind has been dreaming of for thousands of years, ­will become a real­ity at last.”38

Sociology, Sexual Difference, Philosophy: Li Da Li Da, who survived the wars to become an influential theorist of Mao Zedong Thought and interpreter of Rus­sian and Japa­nese Marxism, also began his ­career translating a canonical work on sexual difference. In the preface to his Chinese translation of Sakai Toshihiko’s Japa­nese version of the most famous chapter of American liberal sociologist Lester Ward’s book Pure Sociology, Li Da stated in Nüxing zhongxin shuo (“On w ­ omen’s centrality”; what Ward termed “gynæcocentrism” in a chapter in Pure Sociology) that Ward’s insight into sexual difference and gynecocentrism was on an intellectual par with Copernicus’s explanation of the solar system and Darwin’s theory of evolution. This was not too farfetched at the time, since Ward was one of the three most influential phi­los­o­ phers of sexuality and sexual difference in Li’s Sino-­Japanese intellectual world. The other two ­were Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, whose works ­were translated and circulated regularly. The Ward translation was by no means Li’s only publication on the w ­ oman question, e­ ither. “Nüzi jie­fanglun” (On the liberation of ­women), published in 1919, and other works mirror Wang Rongbao and Ye Lan’s definition of sexuality, sexual difference, and sociology. Li’s work is suffused with the understanding that ­human sociality is partly motivated by sexual procreation, although Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  8 9

he would resolve in the end the tension between social sciences and natu­ral sciences that he inherited. When Li embraced what he called Marxist or materialist philosophy, he realized that philosophy is “the science of sciences” ­because Marxist philosophy synthesizes truths derived from the physical and the ­human sciences. While he did not stay with Ward’s s­ imple argument about sexual reproduction, and his grasp of Marxism deepened into a realization that the means and social relations of production and of ­labor power ­were the evolutionary generative force, he never subordinated the insight that had struck him so forcefully, that ­women formed the root of ­human existence. As did Qu Qiubai, Li had an enduring interest in gynecocentric theory, and a residue of the argument he translated from Ward occurs in a more Engelsian form in his first major book, Xiandai shehuixue (Modern sociology).39 Ward, for his part, claims to be the originator of the theory of female superiority in h­ uman evolution. Like socialists’ and Marxist sociologists’ emerging consensus, Ward believed sexual difference was central to social evolution yet difficult to explain ­because it entangled natu­ral and ­human science. The basic prob­lem in “The Gynæcocentric Theory” is to figure out how our species created binary sexual reproduction. Fundamentally, this is a zoological question, but in t­ hose times the distinction between the physical, or natu­ral, and the ­human, or social, sciences was porous, and the origin of sexual difference was also considered part of a social science investigation. Organic h­ uman evolution requires the ability to secure variation. Many species reproduce by producing single-­cell (parthenogenesis) clones of themselves; multicellular individuals may divide or may simply release sperm and ova for haphazard fertilization, so the result may be a better-­adapted individual. From the nineteenth-­ century physiological and biological evolutionary position, the question appears in the following terms: How does protoplasm generate enough nutrition to enable not just the mixing of sperm and ova but the ability of the h­ uman mammal female to retain the growing fetus inside herself?40 Ward’s “The Gynæcocentric Theory” claims that, funnily enough, scientific evidence supports a theory that the ­human species began as female. Ward drew on Darwin, Charles Lyell, Herbert Spencer, John A. Ryder, Edouard Van Beneden, and other zoologists to support this alleged scientific fact. In Ward’s view, the Arachnida, or spider, class is not an evolutionary perversion but an ancient form of reproductive exchange in which the female extracts sperm and consumes the sperm 90 

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donor. Ward then contests the popu­lar view that the ­human male, male mammals generally, and male birds are superior to the female and that the female is a form of “arrested development” in the h­ uman species, where males evolved more quickly than females. Ward’s comments are ingenious. The female, he argues, represents the normal condition, while the condition of the male is abnormal. In species terms, females must remain the center of gravity in all biological systems and must select for variation; males just provide it. Ward interpreted sexual se­lection as nature’s mechanism to continue the female-­centeredness of reproduction and preserve the female’s status as the “hereditary trunk” of what we now call dna and rna. Though the female is the ancestral trunk in ­humans, unlike other mammals, the sexes choose each other on the basis of dif­fer­ ent, functional, evolutionary mandates. Consequently, while females are the original h­ umans, males began as an extrusion to make it pos­si­ble for a single, female, ­human host to extrude a ­human sperm, and it began at the instigation of females. In Ward’s imagination, the evidence presented a situation in which female ­humans sexually selected for rationality, rather than for strength or good looks, in what over time emerged to become men. Indeed, w ­ omen started to accidentally breed men who w ­ ere superrational, and that led to the tipping point, the gender power imbalance. Ward is careful to say that both sexes in ­humans possess rationality. But he is more interested in how an evolutionary speedup, an increased rationality in men, enabled them to seize control of c­ hildren from m ­ others. Rationality in men had led to the overthrow of the ­mother right and the establishment of patriarchy. Luckily, of course, an evolutionary redress to this injustice was already in pro­cess. Men abuse w ­ omen not ­because they are hateful, strong, stupid, or brutish. Men have simply not yet evolved the capacity for empathy that ­women have. As ­women begin to sexually select men for empathy, the most egregious abuses of the patriarchal pre­sent should resolve themselves, and w ­ omen ­will have bred a superior group of mates. Several questions arise out of Li’s preoccupation with Ward: (1) To what degree did Li bring “the gynæcocentric theory” into his sociology, and (2) is the fascination with the animal origins of sexual se­lection and social evolution a shared socialist tradition, or is it particularly pronounced in Mao Zedong Thought? Like Qu Qiubai, Li was drawn from the start to the philosophical implications of dialectical materialism. He felt attracted to translating and publishing core Japa­nese social science theory as well as basic works on land and po­liti­cally strategic analyses Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  91

of economy and society. An itinerant Marxist phi­los­o­pher, he taught in universities, always in danger, always outside of yet dependent on his Chinese Communist Party connections. He survived, was readmitted to the party ­after Liberation (the end of the civil war in 1949), and worked closely with the orthodox strains of thought that would culminate in Mao Zedong Thought ­until he was murdered in a hospital in 1966. As Nick Knight points out, what binds Li to the Marxist proj­ect are his certainty that philosophy has a po­liti­cal purpose, his preoccupation with how to diagnose social prob­lems in order to grasp social change, and his strug­gle to resolve the tension between natu­ral and social science. He would eventually adapt his thinking to Engels’s position laid out in Dialectics of Nature. Like Qu Qiubai, Li was superbly intellectual, and he opened up ideas that motivated revolutionary commitment and action. Li knew international socialist and Marxist debates very well, including ongoing philosophical contentions in Moscow. He was not isolated. His work is not “sinicized” or particularly “Chinese,” b­ ecause it was preoccupied with intricate Soviet Marxism. For instance, in the 1920s a debate broke out among Mark Borisovich Mitin, Emmanuel Semënovic Enčmen, Bukharin, and Deborin over the degree of relative autonomy that the superstructure and h­ uman volition played in politics; in the early 1930s, a similar debate was revived among Stalin, Mitin, Pavel Yudin, and Vasily Raltsevich. While Li had to rely on Japa­nese texts to access ideas from the USSR, ­these ­were abundant, and Li selected Deborin and Mitin, who, although hostile to one another, concurred on the centrality of contradiction in the dialectic; both agreed on a social etiology for sudden developmental leaps or historical events and also agreed that the unity of opposites was a natu­ral law, as well as a so­cio­log­i­cal truth. This was true b­ ecause the unity of opposites had been resolved in the science of physics.41 To what degree did Li continue to fold into Marxism the question of ­women’s centrality in social evolution? Over the 1920s, Li’s grasp of Rus­sian materialist conceptions of history and Marxist theory of social change developed in relation to changes in Moscow and the cycles of Sino-­Japanese translation. By the 1930s, Li was emphasizing the “causal primacy within the forces of production, and in par­tic­u­lar within its sphere of technology,” but at the same time balancing this formula against his per­sis­tent and initial appreciation of the relative powers of the superstructure.42 As early as the 1926 volume Modern Sociology, Li considered the relation of sub and superstructure to be a feedback loop 92 

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in which developments in one would be translated into actions carried out effectively in the other. This is a standard dialectical position. Rooted in economic determination in the last instance, Li put politics in charge as he wrote and translated volume a­ fter volume of exposition on the dialectic, on the materialism of social relations, on the possibility of land revolution, and so on. In his Outline of Sociology, he would further develop an immanent critique that places causality within an “internally generated motion.”43 In his major work, Modern Sociology, Li distanced himself from major nonsocialist tendencies in the study of society. The mission of sociology, he wrote, is to grasp and change the t­ hing called society. Making Ellwood his straw-­man bourgeois theorist, Li shows Ellwood placing sexual reproduction at the center of social theory and animating reproduction with instinctive drives but in the end reaching a theoretical impasse ­because this ­simple theory cannot address social injustice. Sociologies rooted in instinctual drives cannot reach beyond reformism, according to Li, since they revolve around the question of what is natu­ral to the species. This short-­circuits the relation between animal drives and social habits, confusing the two and appealing to change on an individual ethical level via self-­restraint or l­ egal enforcement. While Li criticized sociologies rooted in Eu­ro­pean contract theory and natu­ral rights, he is more emphatic about psychological forms of sociology than abstract ideas of contracts and rights. In terms of social essence (shehui benzhi) and the alleviation of injustice, then, Eu­ro­pean contract theory, biological sociology, and sociology of emotion are at best ameliorative. Yet Li was not reactive. ­After sketching out the weaknesses of so­cio­ log­i­cal traditions that make law, biology, or emotion the central motive force in theories of society’s origins and its laws of change, Li defined historical materialism around t­ hose same questions. In other words, it is not that law, procreative physiology, and emotional life are bad or worthless objects of study. But when mea­sured against the relations of production and productive forces, they are not strong enough to sustain a plausible general theory of real­ity. While Li, to my knowledge, did not directly address the question of scientific repre­sen­ta­tion of real­ity, he presumed what Qu Qiubai had sought to demonstrate, that the advantage of the social sciences was that they described and analyzed the real­ity of social relations and the ways social change could be understood and channeled. That is why Li seems to take most umbrage against Ellwood, who relied heavi­ly on instinctual and emotive ethics to approach what Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  9 3

he called social prob­lems. The social-­problem focus entangled natu­ral desire and social ­factors in an unsustainable mixture, according to Li. This led to excessive individualism in the theory b­ ecause if Ellwood argues that sexual desire is the origin of society, then society is naive and un-­ self-­reflective; this “bourgeois” origin story puts the brakes on social awareness and social or po­l iti­c al action. It is a fundamental prob­ lem with all natu­ral science–­based instinct theories that cross the line between the natu­ral and the social sciences. It does not admit h­ uman consciousness into its framework. And without consciousness ­there is only reformism or devolution. Indeed, Ellwood’s theory of evolutionary reform and poverty amelioration left control of society in the hands of the most conservative stratum of the ruling class. Thus, for all Ellwood’s vaunted interest in social prob­lems, in Li’s reckoning Ellwood’s direction was not an appropriate one for Chinese materialist sociology to take. Like social contract and emotion-­driven theories, amelioration is restricted to existing minority power elites, and they have ­little reason to change the stasis. From the perspective of Chinese historical materialist so­cio­log­i­cal theory, Li argued, the emotions and physiology and the law of contract appear but in a dif­fer­ent guise, in a dif­fer­ent relationship to the motive force. Sociology, Li stated, must use historical materialist methods to explain social essence. Historically, society had not required contractual relations to form itself. Society also did not emerge out of ­human imagination or emotional attachments, and it was and is not the sum total of organisms operating unconsciously in relation to subliminal natu­ral law. Only when ­people enter into production relationships does society or social essence appear, for t­ hose who do not work do not eat. H ­ umans started as a horde and lived by satisfying immediate natu­ral desires for sex and food, but even in primitive times, the ancients began to regulate their animality b­ ecause, using the materials they had at hand, they began to realize the efficacy of systems of exchange, systems of social relations, and eventually incest taboos; this led, in turn, to economic advances, and humanity left the natu­ral environment’s restraints b­ ehind.44 The tension between our social self-­consciousness and our ability as social beings to augment and change our selves and surroundings was never a repudiation of our mammal origins but rather a leave-­taking. Unlike the bees or the vegetables, h­ umans became self-­aware ­human animals. Put another way, Li’s Modern Sociology, which became the period’s best-­selling introduction to historical materialism and was constantly 94 

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reissued, asserted that biology, physiology, anatomy, and the natu­ral sciences crystallized into a scientific worldview situating natu­ral science inside social relations of production. In the vari­ous social pro­cesses that Li described in his lyrical classical Chinese, the natu­ral or mammal ­human could not but eventually be dominated by its own creation, society, the sum total of all social relationships of production, exchange, and reproduction. As differentiation of work occurred and space and circumference of exchange widened, mutual relations of work drove social evolution forward. But where theorists of desire or emotion had argued that mammals are driven by e­ ither evolving sensitivity to variation or aesthetic plea­sure or appreciation of rationality, Li argued that in the pro­cess of material production, a spiritual culture arises out of the material productive relations, causing plea­sure, improving the productive forces, and stimulating social evolution. Social pro­gress is the pro­gress of the productive forces. In his book’s short chapters, originally designed to be lectures, Li incorporated much Eu­ro­pean nineteenth-­century philosophy of rights, instincts, sexuality, and sexual reproduction into his explanation of the relation between the economic base and the superstructure. He carefully illuminated the significance of politics and law in class conflict, relations of class u­ nder the state, and the current global economic and po­liti­cal conjuncture. But then he moved t­ oward a consideration of what he would call the spiritual ele­ments of ­human social life. Ethics holds the same status in social evolution as does instinct, he argued. Embedded in the ­human animal, ethics evolves out of herd integrity ­because an individual h­ uman ­will sacrifice themselves for the species.45 The major world religions are just versions of ways that h­ uman socie­ties have or­ga­nized themselves historically and spatially, to ideologize herd integrity. Art is the concrete expression of our social lives. And, definitively, the superstructure, the place where h­ uman creativity and w ­ ill are expressed, rests dynamically on an economic base consisting of the relations of production and productive forces. In his culminating statement on the role of the superstructure, Li struck a note that is impor­tant for a number of reasons. First, he asserted, the object of philosophy is to understand completely the axiomatic relation of humanity and nature. In his first ­great synthetic work, the phi­los­o­pher sought to bridge the prob­lem evolutionary theory had posed, which is that ­human sexual reproduction is both mammal and social be­hav­ior, an injunction from nature and a complex social Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  9 5

exchange and negotiation. Second, philosophical concepts must be understood to be embryonic ele­ments of the material world, mediated in social economic relations. Always influenced by their situated environment, p­ eople w ­ ill almost involuntarily turn to the exercise of intention to establish social relations. Prevailing thought is connected to power holding and to the desires of the ruling class. Most philosophies show a distinct class character. But, third, thought, in the form of philosophy, has fi­nally evolved a position of autonomy. Philosophy is at the stage of being able to expose for social analy­sis natu­ral secrets that u­ ntil now had defied explanation.46 The role of scientific philosophy is therefore, as we saw in Qu Qiubai, the capacity to see the log­os in the body. The natu­ral sciences clarify and make real to our senses the rational secrets locked in nature. The social sciences track how the dialectic transforms social life and history faithfully. H ­ ere Li repeats the promise of mimesis, to represent accurately and correctly the real­ity of society in its natural-­historical and its social evolutionary guises. In his long chapter on kinship, we find that his foremost instance is sexual reproduction and the extension of h­ uman society through the familiar cycles of the matriarchate, the patriarchy, the gens/ clan, and the state. To bolster his argument that the clan or kinship is the cradle of society, Li invoked Engels, Bachofen, Lewis Henry Morgan (whose work on tribal nations, including the Iroquois, Marx and Engels had cannibalized), and John Ferguson McClennan, the Scottish ethnologist whom Engels relied on in his The Origin of the ­Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Although Li does not repeat Ward’s claim that humanity began with the female, he does not repudiate it e­ ither. It has become, in a sense, beside the point. It does not ­matter historically how sexual reproduction developed zoologically out of protoplasm; we would not exist without physiological change, but that is no longer Li’s primary issue. What ­matters in social terms is how, once the species-­being of ­human mammals’ organic procreative practices was established, kinship relations evolved to support social development. One marker of the humanity of the ­human mammals was the species transition out of primeval promiscuity and into regulated sexual reproduction: vari­ous forms of exchange, sibling incest, group marriage, exchange marriages rooted in kidnapping, bride stealing, and other anthropological residues that ethnologists and anthropologists like Morgan postulated w ­ ere the roots of modern practices. Casual sexual encounters increasingly gave way to productive roles. 96 

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That is why the current bourgeois form of exclusive marriage ­will not be the final solution in the continuous relation of evolution to primal nature and sociality, rooted in taste and mutual attraction, for individuals. And, most impor­tant, this is why w ­ omen are at the center of the proletarian revolution. Born out of economic necessity and socially retained to accumulate wealth, the bourgeois marriage form and its inhuman patrilineal customs have reached an evolutionary dead-­end.47

Foundational Chinese Sociology and Social Revolution Stabilizing a platform called society in sociology took a long time. Questions of categories and referentiality, or basic assumptions in thinking and the ways that expression confirms the truth, all changed as theoreticians injected new realities into the world. The theorization required a concerted debate over specific kinds of society in specific places. By the time sociologist Chen Han-­seng wrote his classic study on tobacco farming and commercial capital ­under U.S., British, and Japa­nese imperialism, Chinese and Sino-­focused sociology was as sophisticated as advertising theory and its subdiscipline, selling social science. While Qu Qiubai’s productive life was cut short, Li Da went on translating and rethinking how to describe Chinese society and what kinds of revolutionary action might be appropriate to the real conditions at hand. When Chinese so­cio­log­i­cal norms fi­nally stabilized, the Marxist philosophical wing continued to theorize the ascent of h­ umans and the role of ­human sexual reproduction in primitive, barbarian, and civilized socie­ties. A U.S.-­style, U.S.-­educated empirical wing took up surveys and disciplinary debates. Their work was certainly loyal to the truth of physiology and thus participated in the event of ­women, but it made w ­ omen into a demographic marker within a naturalistic patriliny. While for Li, what requires fidelity is ­women’s priority and organic creation of the society as such, among the vernacularist empiricists whom I take up in the next chapter, ­women never posed a philosophical, foundational prob­lem. The Marxist philosophical heritage never s­ topped thinking about how society had emerged in the first instance and what role the ­human female played in social evolution. It continued to link the evolution of morals to the evolution of society and to insist that revolutionary values ­were an extension of the natu­ral evolution of better ­women and better men. Importantly, Li and Qu never repudiated the Eu­ro­pean bourgeois sources of Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  9 7

their inspiration. They assimilated and transformed them. Th ­ ere was no scholarly repudiation b­ ecause sociologists in China during this period ­were all familiar with basic social theory. Yan Fu had translated so­cio­ log­i­cal theories, and as we see in the next chapter, even ordinary readers, elites, and nonsociologists read vernacular sociology and published their comments in short articles or opinion pieces. While professional American sociology was a major presence in Chinese universities during ­these years, Li and Qu had no contact with it.48 Thus, ­there is ­little intellectual overlap between pioneer Marxist sociologists and major empiricist, university-­oriented intellectuals like Sun Benwen (1892–1979; doctoral degree from New York University), Tao Menghua (1887–1960; doctoral degree from the London School of Economics), and Lin Yaohua (1910–2000; doctoral degree from Harvard University). Empirically minded scholars—­students trained in ­these programs and by American sociologists like Sidney ­Gamble, with funding from U.S. foundations and universities—­became a wing of the Nationalist governing apparatus. Social engineers participated in the rise of the new universities I noted briefly, which found support from local Chinese power holders, Chinese governments and party states, and particularly religious organ­izations and entities like the Rocke­fel­ ler Foundation, the ywca, and other Christian-­inspired, progressive groups. Empiricists who remained in China ­after Liberation in 1949 fell ­under suspicion, and the new government of the ­People’s Republic of China abolished sociology departments, calling the academic discipline a tainted bourgeois pseudoscience. Revolutionary urgency and the real conditions of their fugitive lives meant that Qu and Li did not form a school of sociology. The basic divide in social theory was philosophical. Th ­ ese and other wings of Chinese social science did cotheorize the event of ­women, however. In the end, a cosmopolitan Chinese Marxist philosophical tradition addressed the prob­lem of physiological w ­ oman in biological and social evolution. The event of ­women in China had multiple sources. Marxists and, as I indicated highlighting He-­Yin Zhen’s philosophy, anarchists made the event a mainstay question and continued to loyally pre­sent true evidence of ­women’s origins. In their view, the zoological ascent of the female of the species was a new truth, and the po­liti­cal strug­gle to install it took a long time. In the chapter that follows, I analyze far less sophisticated disputes about the status of the female h­ uman in society and remedies, large and 98 

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small, for alleviating the social exploitation of ­women’s ­labor and reproductive capacity. So-­called vernacular sociology was a form of scientism, or popu­lar, degraded, aphoristic use of categories like instinct, sexuality, social role, social prob­lem, and so on. But ­here the point is that Marxist and anarchist social philosophy rested on theories about the horde and the ancient matriarchy and consequently made female social contributions a sine qua non of evolutionary sociology. Ideologies generated and chosen by ancestral h­ umans arise out of the relations of production and not only change over time but also, at the beginning and the end of the teleology, hold out the promise of equivalence in difference. At issue in Chinese Marxist sociology are truth and evolutionary urgency, h­ uman praxis, and also the promise that liberation is achievable. Li contributed to the theorization of the social relations of production, and Qu to the princi­ple of mimesis in scholarship. Their insistence that the origins of ­human society lie in the procreative act joining together ­women and men is a scientific claim. The event of ­women is indisputable in natu­ral science.

Foundational Chinese Sociology  •  9 9

Chapter Three

Vernacular Sociology

Vernacular sociology is a tremulous amalgam of natu­ral science, social science, and mimesis. Previous chapters have shown corporate imperialist marketers harnessing social surveys to construct commodity markets. I also showed that commercialization normalized the idea that in society ­people should buy branded commodities. When advertisers built business models to accelerate surpluses—­Vilhelm Meyer, commercial advertising mogul C. P. Ling, and corporate imperialist Nakayama Taiji ­were all speculators in this sense—­they anticipated f­ uture profits. They sought to borrow cash money and invest it u­ nder conditions of l­ imited liability, to get surplus the next year and expand their productive capacity forever; that is, theories about how capitalism works reinforced the ­future anteriority expressed in so­cio­log­i­cal reasoning. Readers familiar with the Eu­ro­pean debate between Louis Althusser and Adam Schaff ­will immediately recognize my position. Schaff argued that all philosophy is written in the ­future anterior, b­ ecause theory is, or equates to, disciplined speculation about a ­future rooted in a correct appreciation of a pre­sent conjuncture, while Althusser, like Michel Foucault, actually discounted subjective time (­human voluntarism), recognizing only breaks, gaps, and disruptions in a geologic historical temporality.1 This chapter underscores the notion that popu­lar generalizations also embed futurity. Unlike Marxists, however, they canonized assumptions about animals, including ourselves, who form socie­ties and relationships

on the basis of instinctual drives. Associative rather than analytic, vernacularists proposed that since (in relation to insects or fish) our physiological makeup makes our bodies more flexible, our natu­ral instincts drive us to form procreative ­couples. Arguing that monogamy is instinctual and yet it needs to be instituted in China’s f­ uture society is to claim both a sexually distinctive origin story and a return to the f­ uture, but, spurious or not, this argument opens a transvaluation of values. The modernist thought revolutions we know as the New Culture Movement (ca. 1915–1930) or the May Fourth Movement (ca. 1919) sought scientific, and modernist ethical foundations to repudiate the large-­family system. More than most turn-­of-­the-­century sociology discussed in e­ arlier chapters, vernacularists made the fabulous accusation that plural, polyandrous, child, and polygamous marriages w ­ ere unnatural and impeded Chinese social and natu­ral or racial evolution. This is not a natu­ral rights argument or even an ethical insight; it is a popu­lar adjustment of social Darwinian logic to the desires of an aspirational bourgeoisie. In fact, at the time ­these contradictory and teleological theories emerged in the late Qing period, a consensus still held that procreative ­family only existed to fulfill patrilineal expectations that every­o ne produce sons, f­ athers, and grand­sons. Late imperial procreative relationships could be arranged in a huge variety of ways (marriage, concubinage, polygamy, polyandry, ­house­hold ­women, contractual conceptions, e­ tc.). As historian Francesca Bray shows between the f­ ourteenth and nineteenth centuries, a gap had opened separating procreation from kinship relations and reifying an elite domestic hierarchy, in which ritual first wives took exclusive maternal possession, becoming the primary ­mother of all the husband’s c­ hildren. Any plural sexual relationships the male ­family members struck up with second wives or concubines and maids all had l­ egal standing, but the biological m ­ others of resulting ­children could not claim the ­children as their own. Ritual kinship order trumped gestational biology.2 Mainstream May Fourth social theory and youth culture in the 1920s revolved around what intellectuals called social prob­l ems, or shehui wenti. Thus, the w ­ oman prob­lem, the youth prob­lem, the rural prob­lem, the language prob­lem all ­were identified and so­cio­log­ic­ ally defined. To reiterate, a fulsome eugenic stance on individual sexual se­lection underwrites this notion but it is internally inconsistent. Vernacular sociologists’ progressive temporality promised to remake social relationships to approximate what it posited w ­ ere “natu­ral” ones, or humanity’s Vernacular Sociology  •  1 0 1

instinctual order. This suggests that what they meant by social prob­lem mea­sured aberrance in relation to allegedly social scientific norms and therefore natu­ral truths. So besides positing Chinese culture’s relative “unnaturalness” this ideology promoted the truism that animal instincts drive individual ­people to form families, that push ­humans into sophisticated, highly articulated socie­ties where, in evolutionary theoretical terms, we often encounter developmental prob­lems. While this formula has difficulty differentiating what is social from what is natu­ral, that is not a reason to disregard it since vernacular sociology excited popu­lar imagination and introjected itself into the textbook market, as Peter G. Zarrow has shown. The conventional elite big f­ amily with its multiple wives, its subordinated w ­ omen who did not own their own ­children, got attacked for being unnatural, socially backward, not able to consume or evolve appropriately, and immoral.3 Commercial ephemera played a role in establishing the “social prob­lem” paradigm. A 1931 Sincere Department Store advertisement (figure 3.1) standardized the notion that consuming modern products is a zoologically reasonable act in a cap­i­tal­ist society. The text suggests that buying commodities renders a ser­v ice to society, ­because the more you consume, the more your race, nation, and culture pro­gress or evolve. This is vernacular sociology expressed in commercial terms. It asserts that society’s substrate is biological and that biology’s expression is not only social but, since it is social, also commercial and by nature commodified and acquisitive.4 To repeat, while sexual and social evolution are never easy to disaggregate in modern thought, in this drawing a girl figure chooses the most modern industrially produced commodity to buy and thereby magically adds potent energy to the nation. High-­end product advertising glamorizes acquisition while providing a social scientific justification for a class fantasy.5 ­There are three overlapping, discernible cohorts in the vernacular so­ cio­log­i­cal stream. First, ­there are vulgarized versions of Yan Fu’s British empiricism. In contrast to Chinese Marxists, who pioneered dialectical logic to explain social evolution, vernacularists in the Yan Fu school argued allegorically: they w ­ ere sensible, but they w ­ ere not reflexive or interested in considering the prob­lems their own thinking raised. The second group consists of Japa­nese contemporaries like Ariga Nagao, whose works translated from Japa­nese into Chinese underwrote late Qing dynastic reforms. Ariga, like so many con­temporary Japa­nese intellectuals, read Eu­ro­pean social theory and brought ideas into Japa­nese 102 

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3.1  ​Ad for Sincere Depart-

ment Store with an iconic modern girl gazing in awe at her mail-­delivered commodities. Funü zazhi 17, no. 8 (August 1931).

circles for many reasons but among them to legitimate Japan’s imperialist proj­ects. Japa­nese theorists who entered into this stream of Chinese-­ language translations aligned social evolutionary theory and instinct to generalize about the strug­gle of the fittest nations, races, and imperial proj­ects. The third group are a younger, vernacularizing May Fourth cohort that Tsing-­song Vincent Shen calls the “social science humanists” and Wang Xiaodan terms “the new intellectuals.”6 Shen’s characterization rests on a joke, which is that humanists like Ma Junwu (1881–1940), who, over the course of his lifetime, translated the entire corpus of Charles Darwin’s works (and Zhou Jianren [1888–1984], who also translated Darwin and wrote eugenics for mass audiences), w ­ ere literary translators. To put this bluntly, social science humanists had no social science background. Vernacularizing social science became a sideline occupation for educated Chinese during the first half of the twentieth ­century, and the reverse also proved true: literary scholars with no literary backgrounds emerged out of the natu­ral and social sciences into general popu­lar or vernacular social theory. Significant numbers of Vernacular Sociology  •  1 0 3

educated men who started or even completed degrees in new science disciplines like economics (the literary pioneer Yu Dafu), medicine (the writers Guo Moruo and Lu Xun), and military engineering (the cultural theorist Cheng Fangwu) ended up champions of the h­ uman sciences. An excellent model of a social science humanist is Zhang Ziping, who, to support his cultural activities, began as a professional geologist and is remembered for his pioneering role in the modern small-­press movement. As historian Ling Shiao has shown, small presses competed with the three big, capital-­intensive national presses—­Shangwu, Zhonghua, and Shijie—­when the topic was vernacular social science.7

Yan Fu’s School of Vernacular Sociology Yan Fu’s most widely read book was Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, which Yan reconfigured into a best-­selling “translation,” Tianyan lun (On evolution); but his Shehui tongquan (Full account of society) also interpreted William Stanley Jevons and John Stuart Mill on logic, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and Edward Jenks’s History of Politics. Yan was a complex figure, and the Huxley meditation had an enormous impact, but he was a generation older than the New Culture Movement vernacularists, and for all their strangeness, his interpretations ruptured norms in a way that no one had before and opened the floodgates for a younger cohort. Shen notes that in “Yan Fu’s translation, [Huxley’s] hy­po­thet­ic­ al sentences become categorical assumptions, while the descriptive sentences become involved with emotional and affective interpretations.”8 This holds true generally in vernacular sociology, but Yan can serve as the exemplar b­ ecause he insisted that “science” is a true theory about tangible evidence and therefore a picture of real­ity; that is what scientific mimesis promises. So the allegorical logic that Yan developed in his Spencerian Darwinism does precisely what professional sociologists like Fan Jichang railed against; it turned a hypothesis into an assertion. In 1924, in “Shehui kexue he benneng de wenti” (Social science and the instinct prob­lem), Fan was already calling out the idea that physiology motivates social pro­gress.9 Whenever inept social scientists cannot resolve something, Fan acerbically noted, they call in so-­called animal-­instinct theory to back them up. “Social science should basically get rid of talk about instinct,” he wrote. “Instinct theory in psy­chol­ogy was originally an ‘as if ’ proposition, not a fact. Hypotheses 104 

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[jiashe] in science are often an absolutely necessary tool used to explain and analyze actuality. But a hypothesis can never simply be used indiscriminately to explain a phenomenon.”10 That said, according to Yan’s text, ­there are three levels of empirical truth: the astral (the Copernican revolution in space and modern astronomy), the bio (physiology, natu­ral se­lection, sexual se­lection), and the socio, and each is a revelation ­because they are demonstrable and tangible. At the astral level, atomic theory and chemistry demonstrate truth; at the biological level, readers have the truth of natu­ral se­lection ensuring the survival of the ­human species; and the social sciences prove ­humans build increasingly complex social worlds inside nature. This last dimension gives social science its scientific gloss.11 Yan’s argument—­ remember that he is speaking through Huxley and Darwin, voicing his own opinion—­goes like this: As humanity learned to invest its animal essence in nature, the achievements of socialized ­humans accelerated, and the global population expanded, forcing Eu­ro­pe­ans into colonization proj­ ects. Given the historical propagation of Eu­ro­pean colonialism, humanity confronted prob­lems. ­Humans, unlike worker bees in the beehive, become more ­human and less animal as an effect of living in groups, but it is not ethically or zoologically feasible to breed ­humans in the way that ­humans breed insects, plants, and animals. This is an obvious dilemma if one is being colonized. More positively, however, unlike bees or other social insects, ­humans, even when facing a necessarily imposed oppression, have no physiological constraints on their ability to actively change the environment and their own being. Only ­humans continue to evolve socially. In Yan’s interpretation, imperialism, colonialism, overpopulation, and racialism played a salutary role in China’s social evolution. In the chapter of his On Evolution titled, “­Human Society,” Yan directly invoked society as a category to address the philosophical question of the humanity of ­human animals. In his version, ­humans are the zoological or biological elite ­because social groupings (qun) facilitate our species development. Like Li Da and so many other Marxists and vernacularists, Yan also situated sexual difference at the center of h­ uman existence. B ­ ecause ­humans improve at the level of our biological substrate and through time in the pro­cess of our social differentiation, the astral level of knowledge is increasingly open to h­ uman empirical scientific understanding and to ontological speculation. That is, socially advanced ­people can grasp all levels of real­ity. Unlike other animals, particularly insects, our physiques make it pos­si­ble for us to develop socially and Vernacular Sociology  •  1 0 5

intellectually as we also evolve biologically. Evolution itself has made it pos­si­ble for us to understand the real­ity of nature, geologic time, and social forces and even gives us the capacity to understand real­ity. This was a foundational epistemic move and is prob­ably the reason that Yan, despite his eccentricities and willfulness, is a major con­temporary intellectual figure.12

The Polymorphous Origins of Chinese Vernacular Sociology Late Qing scholar-­officials had turned ­toward social science seeking the intellectual roots of power a­ fter China’s 1895 loss to Japan in the First Sino-­Japanese War. While Japa­nese imperialism had caused the catastrophe, Qing and post-­dynastic intellectual radicals seemed less interested in positing Chinese singularity than in learning from social scientific styles of writing translated from Japa­nese into Chinese. In other words, they did not dwell on what special characteristics of Chinese culture had led to failure (although this would l­ater become a standard part of Chinese intellectual culture) but rather presented translations that, while obviously chauvinistic and clearly Japan oriented, made universalist claims. The vernacularists not only did not nationalize international social science but did the reverse, setting into circulation their own interpretations of theories and theorists wherever they found them. This was the shortcut around Eu­rope, which Chinese social science advocates concluded lay b­ ehind Japan’s successful intellectual revolution during the Meiji Restoration.13 Wang Xiaodan’s history of Chinese social science translation illuminates this seeming obliviousness to nationalist perspectives. First, Wang notes that vernacularists ­were indiscriminate.14 Second, Wang sees a cohort of ­these new intellectuals carving out a fresh modernist profile in Chinese intellectual history, and, third (Wang’s core point), the vernacularist wave, as we saw in the case of early Marxist theory, went for social science epistemology.15 Vernacularists shared with social science a belief that natu­ral science opened the door to accurate, objective or mimetic repre­sen­ta­tion and that the social sciences could do the same with appropriate methods. Social sciences held out the promise of a universalist language in which all of humanity registered their own local particularities. 106 

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Figure 3.2 shows an ad for Japa­nese Ajinomoto cooking powder that ran perennially in Chinese-­language newspapers. The cartoon shows a modern Chinese city. In between the sketched-­out blocks of tall buildings is a skyscraper-­size package of the taste-­enhancing cooking powder, or msg (monosodium glutamate). Skyscrapers and Ajinomoto—­one a part of a modern cityscape, the other a chemical compound—­belong in the same imaginary universe of a commodity-­rich world that popu­lar sociology rationalizes. The ad’s ordinariness, despite its multilingual orthography, indicates that it participated in naturalizing social life, vernacularizing what are actually complex new ideas. Why put a box of amino acids into a modern landscape? The answer is that advertising condenses knowledge into graphic form and displaces the world of the senses with a ­future i­ magined world of plenty. Life, it turns out, is chemistry! Also, a newly discovered social unconscious (analyzed in chapters 4 and 5) meant that graphic and linguistic displacements ­were endless. Japa­nese ads and Japanese-­language translations of Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment philosophy that ­were then translated into Chinese became omnipresent, prosaic fixtures in Chinese vernacular society, graphesis and popu­lar sociology. For instance, between 1902 and 1915, two translations of Japa­nese Sinophobe Ariga Nagao’s Shehui jinhua lun (On social evolution) appeared in Chinese.16 Repeated translations and multiple reissues suggest that the text was profitable and popu­lar. The primary questions are, first, why readers liked it so much, given Ariga’s position on what he called the double obscurantism of Chinese civilization and the disparaging term Zhina that he used throughout and, second, how deeply texts like this one affected Chinese readers of vernacular social theory.17 On Social Evolution appears to have offered readers the same quality Yan Fu’s texts did. Analytically speaking, in the world of ideas and new cultural movements, the Chinese ­were translating the universal social epistemology seemingly without concern about Sinophobia, so maybe they appreciated Ariga’s attack on the same old Chinese thinking that they would oppose in the New Culture and May Fourth eras. ­These are intriguing concerns b­ ecause Ariga was situated with I­ noue Tetsujiro and Toyama Shoichi, who also authored major attacks on so-­ called Chinese learning in Japan in the 1880s.18 As they turned “away from Asia and ­toward Eu­rope [Datsu-­a],” Japa­nese scholars repudiated Japan’s Confucius school and established epistemological positions expressed in German and French philosophy. Although Ariga’s reasoning Vernacular Sociology  •  1 0 7

3.2  ​Ajinomoto ad showing

a cityscape. Dagongbao 7 (July 21, 1923).

differed from Qu Qiubai’s theory of historical residues, On Social Evolution also postulated that the Chinese language was expendable and that ­people would be better off without it. He believed it relied “on physical form to indicate the abstract”; physicality restricted the Chinese intellectual’s ability to generalize, to “describe abstract relations and hence to develop science and foster pro­gress.”19 Of course this is Sinophobic and absurd, but its perspective is philosophical in the Eu­ro­pean sense. It also expressed Japa­nese intellectuals’ worries over the alleged dead physicality of received Chinese ideas and the brake this putatively put on Japa­nese philosophical creativity. Not much space separates Ariga and Chinese intellectuals like Qu and Lu Xun, who feared that Chinese intellectuals would be forever caught in the retarding, deadly vise of inherited literary writing. ­W hether Sinophobic or Sinophilic, late nineteenth-­century Japa­ nese social scientists had already miraculated a nameable object, society, before Yan Fu interpreted the foundations of Eu­ro­pean social science. Society in Japa­nese speculative work was a reified, organic entity amenable to scientific law and po­liti­cal praxis. However, unlike new 108 

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Chinese scholar-­translators, Japa­nese intellectuals leveraged society to rethink Japa­neseness on a new and allegedly scientific basis and to produce modern interpretations of Japan’s past, pre­sent, and f­ uture.20 Unlike the calque and concept of the ­people or even the nation, the term society opened up a philosophical and empirical proof of ­human agency and thereby authorized Japa­nese theorists’ intent on controlling the general course of social development.21 Consequently, Ariga’s book opened with the declaration “The phenomenon of ­human society exists in truth, and it compels a rational analy­sis to fix the meaning of social phenomena, which is why we have sociology.”22 Sociology’s special brief, the t­ hing that other social science disciplines cannot do, is the sociology of ordinary phenomena. The sociology of ordinary phenomena does not mean particularism, however, or the worship of archaic facticity (an inherent failing of Chinese intellectual practice, in Ariga’s view). Rather, phenomena are comprehensible in relation to larger or more abstract categories, which it is the central task of sociology to establish.23 Two points followed, according to Ariga (in Chinese translations). First, historical sociology must determine which f­ actors have been at work in the rise of the fittest nations—­Japan and Britain—­and the decline, or even the incorporation through imperialism, of weaker ones, such as the subjugation of Greece to Rome (or China to Japan). Second, society is itself an agent. Although h­ umans are social animals, our evolutionary drive and basic instincts, expressed socially in the strug­gle of the fittest, fold humanity into more and more complex social formations. T ­ hese formations, in turn, also strug­gle to survive, and one of their strategies, the one that Ariga explic­itly endorses, is to incorporate primitive protohuman hordes into themselves; this lays the groundwork for Japa­nese imperialist assimilation theory. His discussion on how society emerges historically from its protohuman form into the highly articulated relation of individuals among one another and of masses to the social ­whole is flexible and sophisticated. He is as conversant with the social evolution of the American aboriginal Comanches and Dakotas as he is with the Madagascar primitives, which all Spencerian phi­los­o­phers had to be.24 The motility of socie­ties, units of competitive drives, offers the possibility of accelerating development. Given this, perhaps what Chinese readers found most centrally in­ter­est­ing was the logical connection Ariga drew between individual improvement, the accelerating development of society, and the need to enlarge and improve patriotism (aiguo zhixin) through disciplined industry, scholarship, and native aesthetics.25 Vernacular Sociology  •  1 0 9

Ariga’s story about the evolutionary rise of h­ uman subjects occurs in the chapter on “groups” or “society,” which the Chinese translator rendered as qun. As per the cliché, more than two persons living together in a group form a society. The discipline for studying p­ eople in groups or society is called e­ ither qunxue or shehuixue. The object of sociology is to address what is called a “subject of consideration,” or duixiang. The question that sociology addresses in its objective research is called a “so­cio­log­i­cal subject,” and an “item” (shixiang) is a social or so­cio­log­i­ cal prob­lem. And he goes on thus for pages; methods are delineated in capsule form (the rational method, the experiential method, e­ tc.), and differences among scientific inductive and deductive or nonempirical methods are all carefully laid out à la the New Erya. Each ele­ment of the modernist lexicon is carefully burnished and defined. ­These are no longer just vocabulary lessons but rather toeholds in a ­great facade of so­cio­log­i­cal comprehension to which Chinese popu­lar elites reading and writing in the 1920s clung in an effort to valorize individual volition. The individual is a core ele­ment of vernacular social science theory. In the Ariga translation, the individual is where society and nature meet. ­Women are a social prob­lem, but the male individual became an agonistic ideological subject in po­liti­cal strug­gles among May Fourth cohorts, who returned over and over to the truths of their own personalities and to the question of how Chinese ­people improve. Sexuality was our animal instinct: in good socie­ties it leads to eugenic pro­ gress, and in bad ones it is repressed, leading to devolution.

The Individual in Vernacular Sociology Endo Ryukichi’s Modern Sociology, published in Japan in 1903 and in Chinese translation in 1920, illustrates how the individual became a foundational argument in Chinese vernacular sociology.26 Endo condensed into systematic terms ideas that became normative in advertising images, movies, personal testimonials, personal autobiographies, and the new modern fiction. In Endo’s view, all interior feelings, desires, w ­ ill, intellect, and mediated instinctual needs that our animal nature has imposed on us are expressed individually. Endo was concerned with both the basic theories of general sociology (which, of course, means primarily French, German, and U.S. scholarship) and with how Western social theories mea­sured up in relation to East Asian social forms. Modern Sociology 110 

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begins with a general introduction to the types of sociology and their contents, their materials and methods, and their major problematics and systems. It moves on to chapters on precursors, the so­cio­log­i­cal method and its relation to natu­ral sciences, the subjective f­ actors in sociology (desire, subject, ideation), statistics and statistical categories, the study of social development, primitive society and matrilineality, social systems, key figures in social theory (Lester Ward, Émile Durkheim, J. H. W. Stuckenberg, Herbert Spencer, e­ tc.), and foundational prob­ lems in sociology. Endo’s par­t ic­u­lar concern was the question of individual subjectivity, and within that, he singled out the prob­lem of the ­human ­will. Endo adapted U.S. sociologist Lester Ward’s theories regarding the material foundations of h­ uman life as detailed in Ward’s 1898 Outlines of Sociology. Having emerged out of primal m ­ atter or plasma, Ward postulated, ­humans are an assertive and self-­evolving species. Of all the complex ele­ments that make up individuals, the ­w ill (yizhi) compels and organizes action, including self-­evolution. Thus, for instance, in a detailed discussion of the relationship between desire (yuwang) and ­will, Endo develops a complex argument regarding the relationship of desiring, willing, and compelling the other in relation to one’s self. Each quality of personhood, willing and desiring, is a separate capacity or function inside individuals.27 The ­will is exercised in relation to desire or the psy­ chol­ogy of emotions and, very impor­tant, spirit (jingshen) and so on by consolidation (jiehe), a pro­cess that ­will not concern us ­here. In his conclusion, Endo asserts that the unit of all of ­these calculations is the individual (geren).28 And he situates individuals in ­every major social collectivity (nation, race, ­etc.) one would expect late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century evolutionary sociology to assert, no m ­ atter where in the world one encountered it. Endo’s writing is not professional sociology, and his speculation is not philosophy in the Marxian or Hegelian tradition, ­either. It is loosely empiricist and vaguely notional, built on the foundation of Eu­ro­pean and U.S. so­cio­log­i­cal speculations refracted through the sensibility and concerns of a self-­identified Japa­nese nationalist translated into Chinese and being read in Chinese in Chinese cities. Two t­ hings are concerning at this juncture. First, the connection between the natu­ral sciences and the social sciences—or physiology and society—in vernacular sociology gave Endo’s new social categories (for example, society, desire, individual, and sexual essence) not merely a universalizing (all ­humans are the same) Vernacular Sociology  •  1 1 1

but a totalizing (what it means to be a ­human, ­humans are now capable of fully knowing) quality. ­There is no room in ­these generalizations for alternatives to the logic that individuals live in society. (One obvious alternative is the theory that we became a species in the pro­cess of mutually interdependent, affective relations starting at the earliest stages of creative hominoid evolution, a Bergsonian argument.) Endo and his modernist friends recognized dif­fer­ent social origins, races, and sexes, but to them all history flowed in one direction b­ ecause beneath historical change is evolutionary pro­gress and its reproductive biology. Endo’s argument reinforced the anatomically obvious natu­ral man and natu­ral ­woman just then populating advertising images. Standing ­behind the question of ­will and willed be­hav­ior, in the shadows, is the question of what p­ eople desire and why they need Pond’s vanis­ hing cream or bat’s Three ­Castle brand cigarettes (figure 3.3)—­“Every­thing you could desire” (shishi ruyi)—­rather than homegrown tobacco or another brand. The advertisement shows an iconic Chinese w ­ oman celebrating National Day. She is a self-­w illed, skilled consumer, and she is inviting the crowd assembled below her to do what they want and enjoy themselves in the new nation. This ad image condenses desires into a ­simple, pleasing image saturated with complex new ideas. Vernacular sociology ­imagined it could explain how ­people manage in their social lives to negotiate their own humanity; the question of personality (renge), which progressive Chinese feminists pursued over the next de­cade, does not appear in Endo’s text, but the theory that h­ uman individuals live together in socie­ties as collectivities (markets, races, nations, communities, ­etc.) and in exercising their individual w ­ ills forward the aims of the race, nation, community, and self does. And when Endo talked about desire or ­will, he included the ­will to purchase and consume. Of course, he also meant ­women’s ­will to get an education and every­one’s ­will to be good parents and eugenic partners. But like the advertising in figures 3.1 and 3.3, Chinese readers of Endo saw the new society, the new consuming ­woman, and the new nation cheering her on to strength, prosperity, and happiness for all. The 1865 “five-­fold classification” of the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan world racial stocks and races, produced by J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), came into Chinese circulation via the Japa­nese theorist Shibue Tomotsu.29 Perhaps the young ­woman who translated Shibue from Japa­nese, Ms. Jin Mingluan, liked Shibue’s theory of sociosexual agglomeration, according to which sexual se­lection 112 

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3.3  ​Female consumer

holding a ruyi symbolizing good fortune. Dagongbao, 98, no. 848 (December 29, 1929).

puts the autonomous w ­ ill to choose sexual partners into the brains of the females of species.30 Shibue linked naturalistic sexual attraction and racial purification, in the tradition of U.S. feminist Margaret Sanger, who toured China and Japan in the 1920s.31 But any con­temporary popu­lar sociology in any of ­these languages tells the same story: the reproductive ­couple is the basic unit of ­family formation; families have historically taken diverse but, evolutionarily speaking, progressive forms (usually the progression is from polyandry to polygamy to monogamy); ­family, however or­ga­nized and however closely it approximates the most natu­ral productive procreative unit of one man and one w ­ oman, is the basis of society, and society is the foundation of the nation; the modern heterosexual ­couple is consequently both modern in the sense that it liberates ­women to choose male partners and primeval ­because it is also the most natu­ral dyad available in eugenic or developmental sexuality.32 The benneng, or instinct prob­lem, occupied a space in professional social science as well as popu­lar agita. Guo Renyuan, a Berkeley-­educated physiologist and psychologist, introduced Chinese readers to Karl Vernacular Sociology  •  1 1 3

Groosse and William McDougall, major theorists of instinctual drives. Guo’s background in embryology and somatically rooted biopsychological issues is less significant than his popularization of C. Lloyd Morgan’s Habit and Instinct, William James’s Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, McDougall’s Introduction to Social Psy­chol­ogy, Herbert Spencer’s Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ ogy, D. F. Philips’s Ele­ments of Psy­chol­ogy, and Théodule-­Armand Ribot’s The Psy­chol­ogy of the Emotions to support his own theories and experiments in instinctual psy­chol­ogy.33 Distinguishing animal and ­human instincts, Guo deftly laid out the definition of instinct from En­glish (not German, where the prob­lem is more complex), starting with Spencer’s theory of innate instinct and expanding into late nineteenth-­century theories about reflexive instinct and psy­chol­ogy, perception, be­hav­ior and emotion, physiology, and life-­stage instincts, from birth to adolescence.34 Guo postulated a term for explaining the sexual and parental instinct, which he called the nannü benneng, literally, the instinct of the sex-­differentiated ­human.35 Likewise, Chen Dingmou, who trained at the University of Chicago Sociology Department, in 1915 returned to China to teach sociology at Fudan University. In his work, “Putong xinli, yi benneng” (Common psy­chol­ogy, translating instinct), Chen, too, undertook to pop­u­lar­ize core instinct theory for the nonprofessional reader. The latest ­thing in psy­chol­ogy, he felt, was instinct-­driven ­human psy­chol­ogy, feelings and emotion. On top of his exegesis of McDougall, Chen introduced Douglas Alexander Spalding, who like Chen was popularizing late nineteenth-­century discussions of Darwinian instincts in lower mammals. Spalding’s importance to Chen lay in the question of how, since drives are instinctual, psychological states unfold in social life.36 This was not a local prob­lem but a general one b­ ecause ­there seems to be no way of figuring out what determines even our commodity choices, our instinctive animal nature, or our executive function, our feelings, or our w ­ ill. Academic intellectuals like Guo and Chen leaned on U.S. and British intellectual debates b­ ecause they trained in the United States, but teachers and students ­were all vulgarizing the same set of ideas. Taking this debate seriously a ­century ­later is essential (and deeply irritating). Evolutionary philosophy put an epistemological vacuum in middle-­brow social theory, and instinct held out a brass ring. This new dogma did not go wholly uncontested, however. Yan Jibo had registered deep concern about Guo’s initiative in his essay “Faming shi renlei de benneng” (Invention is the instinct of humanity), but the most formidable antagonist of the moment was the counterevolutionary theorist Li Shicen (1892–1934). Li 114 

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rooted his philosophy in Friedrich Nietz­sche and Henri Bergson.37 Bergson’s role in flummoxing teleologies and natu­ral se­lection with notions about creative evolution, subjective voluntarism, and h­ uman emotion has morphed in our time into Deleuzean philosophy, but May Fourth phi­los­o­phers a c­ entury ago used Bergson and Nietz­sche to call out Spencer’s teleological view of ­human evolution.38 Li and Guo squared off over what proportion of mea­sur­able emotion or scientifically ascertainable humanity can be attributed to animal instinct and what proportion to cultural or social f­ actors. Li’s points are philosophical, whereas Guo was a research and lab psychologist in the U.S. social science model. Li figured heavi­ly into the broader philosophical debates in Chinese Marxism. Although Li was a Hunanese, like Mao, he began his intellectual life in Japa­nese, l­ater becoming editor at New Youth (Xinqingnian) and The People’s Tocsin (Minduo), the most avant-­ garde theory journals of their time. Li’s preoccupation with neibo (Nietz­ sche and Bergson) informed his two major works, Philosophies of H ­ uman Life (Rensheng zhexue) and Three Lectures on Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue shijiang), where he approached the question of affect, or materially grounded emotion, by dividing philosophical prob­lems into inner and outer conditions. This grasp of the relation between internal life and material conditions eventually led Li into historical materialism, but the issue at this juncture is how Li embraced nonteleological, multiply explosive evolutionary philosophy and linked Bergson’s thought to nonteleological Chinese thought. Th ­ ese fine distinctions did not resonate with popu­lar audiences. Truisms explaining our be­hav­ior in relation to our animal selves, our physiology, our synapses, and our brain ­matter sold better.39 Guo and Chen w ­ ere credentialed professors. Most instinct theorists ­were not. The engineer and cultural critic Gao Xian had a lot to say on this topic.40 Yan Jibo enthusiastically declared in “Faming shi renlei de benneng” that a discovery instinct existed, so one only had to set one’s mind to it and the world was one’s oyster.41 He used the trope of mushrooms (they grow exponentially), which linked him to British theorists, and he encouraged his peers to jump on the discovery bandwagon. This example is absurd, but Zhou Jianren, the ­brother of Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, also qualifies. Lung-­Kee Sun has long pointed out Zhou Jianren’s role in propagating eugenic sexuality in this era.42 ­There is no need to retrace Sun’s steps, but Zhou Jianren’s neo-­Lamarckian eugenic poetics reiterated vernacular social scientific truisms in literary language. He believed Vernacular Sociology  •  1 1 5

that the fittest races would be t­ hose among whom we find the highest levels of personal choice in romantic and erotic life.43 Zhou bemoaned social limits on eugenic racial health (e.g., parents choosing spouses) and the consequent Chinese racial inferiority and cultural degeneracy. The ­woman’s power to select her spouse was not just natu­ral but invaluable ­because her choice improved species-­being. Allowing ­women to assert their repressed natu­ral rights and ensuring their civil right to choose love would lead to racial betterment. Zhou is precisely Shen’s social science humanist. ­There is no rage h­ ere. When He-­Yin Zhen argued that w ­ omen should choose ­because they had natu­ral rights and ­human erotic desires, she threatened to kill t­ hose standing in her way. She focused on rights, not instincts. Zhou and Gao make the racist point that offloading responsibility for choice onto w ­ omen would improve the race, w ­ hether they liked it or not. But that is as far as Zhou got. Vernacular sociology is not particularly coherent. This is both its weakness and its power in debates over institutions like marriage and divorce.44

Vernacular Sociology, Social Prob­l ems, and May Fourth Youth Culture In the 1920s, Chinese urban popu­lar magazines published continuously on the topic of social science logic, and intellectuals wrote profusely as they strug­gled over natu­ral and social science. A debate structure emerged where young ­people contributed short commentaries to address or resolve what I introduced e­ arlier, the social prob­lem (shehui wenti).45 Lost in the historical novelty of the new so­cio­log­ic­ al logic, new youth embraced the social prob­lem to resolve their own pressing concerns. Relatively abstract arguments about the relation of social and natu­ral sciences in evolution became, among culturally progressive youth, a titanic strug­ gle over their own individual f­ utures. They personalized vernacular sociology’s preoccupation with the primal relationships of individual and society (the social contract), the biological roots of ­human sociality (obligations to oneself and to one’s parents), and so on. Readers’ and writers’ obsessive concern with personal social and reproductive choice formed a big part of confessional sociology in journals like the Ladies’ Journal or Funü zazhi. In this venue, young men and some ­women wrote about themselves, their individual emotions and angst, 116 

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their frustrations, and their efforts to choose social, ethical, and natu­ral pathways for ­future modern life. Sometimes they wrote autobiographically in directly self-­referential style, but they also wrote, as Yan Fu had, using translations to authorize their opinions. During the 1920s translators frequently listed themselves as the author of an essay and assigned what they called the “original” author an inconspicuous second billing. It seems likely that they gave themselves, as translators, first billing ­because they chose and valued the ideas that the first author had roughed out. Translators in this era w ­ ere more like commentators or guides who assimilated the signposts that the first author had installed, and they made truths available to their peers in con­temporary times. In other words, “translators” not only interpreted new, universal ideas and situated themselves vis-­à-­vis ­these ideas but ­were prone to working through personal stakes as they tackled a social prob­lem. In this regard, Wei Xin’s interpretation of Charles Jean Marie Letourneau’s thoughts on the evolutionary significance of divorce is a typical May Fourth commentary. The original author was Letourneau, but Wei Xin (perhaps a pseudonym) published his piece in Yan Fu’s style ­u nder the title “The Evolution of Divorce” (“Lihun de jinhua”).46 Wei himself was likely facing a complex prob­lem many confronted in the first third of the twentieth c­ entury. How could a youth remain attached, loving, and filial in relation to parents and at the same time rebuff a prearranged marriage or, in the worst case, divorce a spouse that the parents had chosen? Wei’s “The Material Basis of Life” (“Shengming zhi wuzhi de jichu”), which appeared in the same year, posited the need to force intellectuals to retheorize life, or ­human existence, in a neofoundational truth about the ascent of humanity, the mammal drive in ­human social norms. In this canonical essay, Wei argued that ­humans are natu­ral beings, originate in nature, and evolve slowly into a complex social order. Our intellectual orientation must begin with the natu­ral sciences, and the clearer theorists are about our natu­ral origins, the more congruent and true so­cio­log­i­cal truths ­will become. To supplant ­earlier thinking about reciprocity and ritual patrilinealism, Wei began his “translation” of Letourneau by thinking about nature. Patrilineal affection is good ­because it is natu­ral, but nature presupposes the emergence of agonistic ­human socie­ties, so to rethink a prob­lem like divorce or marriage requires re-­grounding the social issue in mammalian evolution. Truth is eugenic, so divorce has to be mea­sured in relation to social pro­gress and animal evolution. Vernacular Sociology  •  1 1 7

Another example, Ke Shi’s essay “The Responsibilities of ­Women in Evolution” (“Funü zai jinhua zhong de renwu”), provides Li Da’s and Ward’s argument that ­women are the primary agents of social evolution, although Ke, like so many, equivocated about the unsteady balance of social and natu­ral forces. He drew widely on authorities ranging from the eugenicist paleobotanist Marie Stopes to the neovitalist general or popu­lar scientist J. Arthur Thompson, whose scientistic masterwork The Evolution of Sex, cowritten with biologist and sociologist Patrick Geddes, enjoyed enormous popularity all over the world. In ­these popu­lar evolutionary arguments, the starting point is always the same: evolution is both natu­ral (­humans belong to the mammal ­family, which propagates bisexually) and social; consequently, natu­ral se­lection and sexual se­lection should be yoked together to promote social and species development. ­Women must be ­free to choose on the basis of instinct rather than commanded into f­ amily formation by force of rotten old social convention. This, in itself, is a liberatory argument, if liberation just means choice. ­These pieces comfortably invoke natu­ral science to show how social pro­cesses work or should work in the f­ uture and why sociology is a science like chemistry, biology, and physics. Vernacular sociology belongs in the category of popu­lar philosophy and ideology ­because its social claims exceed the existing science and are archaic in our times (Lionel Tiger notwithstanding).47 Yes, vernacular pop ideas celebrated w ­ omen’s freedom to choose a spouse. Free-­choice marriage should, according to Chinese vernacular cryptoscience, result in social advancement. But with the exception of love, marriages and divorce, vernacular so­cio­log­i­cal arguments ­were fragile ­because they could not explain freedom or social agency. Without an internal logic or scientifically v­ iable evolutionary notion of species development, assertions about the naturalness of mammal nature envelop and fi­nally subsume voluntarism, defaulting in the end to crude, instinct-­driven erotic desire and sexual se­lection. Perhaps the vernacularists put the ­will and willed be­hav­ior at the center of their theories about individualism b­ ecause of a weakness in their argument. Self-­ selective breeding or self-­propelled eugenic development addresses only the most biologically grounded ­human needs. Extrapolating the ­human emotional or personality qualities lying beneath choice has proved far more difficult. In the end, the advocates confronted a philosophical and a ­simple logical prob­lem. How can h­ umans develop volition when their primal instincts operate unconsciously and automatically? What guarantees 118 

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a symbiotic relation of good choices (volition) and good development (evolution rather than devolution)? If so-­called social prob­lems are nothing more than volition gone wrong, or bad choices, how can bad eugenic choices be overcome with good eugenic choices? And so on. Gao Junzhe’s 1930 essay in the professional journal Shehui xuejie (Sociology world) laid out the “biological schools of sociology.”48 Gao was a theorist and sought to reconcile the fragile logic holding natu­ral and social science together. She highlighted a category that she called social se­lection. Darwin himself never speculated about a social se­lection; social se­lection is neither natu­ral (the b­ attle of the fittest) nor sexual (females selecting genes) but, in Gao’s view, an in-­between logic. Social se­lection also did not entirely replicate Spencer although, Gao argued, Spencer’s organicism had given birth to theories of social se­lection. Gao listed three subtopics of social se­lection: race war, eugenics, and population. Less well-­schooled commentators than Gao ­were already adopting popu­lar eugenic concepts in China, as was also happening in the United States, Britain, and Mexico; anywhere one finds relations of modern domination and heterogeneous populations in the early twentieth ­century, eugenics also popped up.49 Debates about ­women and sports, physical education, or just natu­ral mobility (educated w ­ omen getting more physical exercise, for instance) got cast in relation to popu­ lar eugenic improvement schemes.50 Ideologically speaking, virtually no generalizations about the social responsibility of modern ­women seem to have lacked a eugenic or natu­ral science justification, even love itself.51 This reinforces the truism ­here; vernacular sociology is not coherent.52 Yet it invokes a truth of ­women. That truth is physiological: ­women’s reproductive cycle is organic to her body, and her body contributes half the material of ­human vitality to her fetus. In the event of ­women, even incoherent arguments like this one contribute fidelity to the new truth. We have seen female reproductive l­ abor invoked in foundational Marxist sociology. All modernists concurred that female procreative sexuality was the secret of ­human evolution. This view marked the modernist as modernist. Prob­lems remained at the individual level, as vernacular theorists make clear. ­Unless society is epiphenomenal, and He-­Yin Zhen correctly saw that social regulation is nothing more than sanctioned cruelty, ­there is oddly enough no logic in vernacular social theory to explain the existence of society at all. Social organ­ization, social choice, and individual beings have no relevance to species evolution in eugenicist eyes since b­ ehind their argument lies the indefatigable, elastic, Vernacular Sociology  •  1 1 9

amorphous ­thing they called instinct. In the end, importantly and in the face of all this jabberwocky, evolutionary biology and sociology pre­sent a truth of ­women, wrapped around the putative fact that female procreative sexuality is the truth of all truths. A debate between the vernacular psychologist Pan Guangdan and the sociologist Sun Benwen further clarifies this point. Pan began his rise as a vernacular critic, while Sun became a dean of non-­Marxist, university-­ certified, disciplinary sociology. They clashed over the question of racial fitness. Pan, who had voiced the prob­lem of Chinese racial degeneration in relation to Eu­ro­pean and U.S. “races,” claimed that natu­ral drives, heredity, and intelligence are linked to evolutionary development. He argued that no evidence supported the theory that intelligence and virtue are class related, and he rejected notional cultural capital or social advantage. His take on eugenicism was that p­ eople individually, in each generation, should be out in the social jungle competing for sexual partners.53 In other words, when w ­ omen are authorized to select their mates, like wild animals selecting the fittest for reproduction, then the quotient of superior ­people in a civilization ­will rise. The herd, in Pan’s case, was the ­human, cultural, national society. Sun made the stronger case. He avoided the prob­lem Pan introduced, the paradox of liberating w ­ omen to choose versus w ­ omen’s biological instinct. Sun did not directly address the question of how sociology or philosophy explains ­women theoretically. He simply stated that ­humans live in socie­ties and that in all socie­ties ­women play a key role in social pro­cesses, such as maternal socialization or socialization into literacy. Sun took Charles A. Ellwood’s pathway, in other words. Like Ellwood, Sun argued that social work and professional social workers could resolve social prob­lems. The job of sociology was to adjudicate social prob­lems when, for instance, an instinct threatened to run roughshod over p­ eople’s well-­being. To Sun, the w ­ oman question was no more pressing than other social questions like criminality and poverty. All could be resolved through social reform and goodwill. Nevertheless, despite differences, each man made the female reproductive body the central (and in nonfeminist writing like this, largely undeveloped) ground of social existence. By 1929 the centrality of female fertility, the female w ­ ill to choose, females as the switch point between the pro­cesses of h­ uman reproduction, the h­ uman sciences, and civilizational achievements was so foundational in vernacular and professional sociology that it could be safely assumed.54 120 

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The Event of ­Women and ­Women’s Liberation Vernacular sociology’s circularity raised immediate, power­ful doubts. The point Li Shicen, Ke Shi, and o­ thers sought to establish was that, mea­sured against the relations of production and l­abor power, meta­phors about bio-­evolution creating species-­specific h­ uman brains are an implausible theory of real­ity. Li Shicen criticized vernacular sociology for situating the laws of social evolution on the surface of society and charged that it fibbed about social contracts, citizenship, and “social roles.” Li did not unilaterally reject the agon of physiology versus natu­ral rights. Property law, procreative physiology, selective breeding, and emotion are impor­ tant to Marxist social theory and critical social studies and to any adequate understanding of h­ uman society. Once mimetic scientific claims and realism in literary repre­sen­ta­tion promise to accurately represent scientifically demonstrable nature, however, a fight over “what is real” is triggered. Li set out to demonstrate that surface-­level bourgeois or vernacular sociology had failed the real­ity test. Li Shicen made Ellwood his straw man. Li argued that Ellwood shared a general weakness apparent in most natu­ral science–­based instinct theories, b­ ecause he and they had trou­ble explaining h­ uman consciousness. Ellwood had subsumed sexual desire to instinct. Alas, for the sake of consistency in his argument, instinct bypassed consciousness, where ­will and emotion reside. If p­ eople are instinct driven, their capacity to resist a bad real­ity or to change their perception of a real one w ­ ill be minimal. Li-­style anarchist and Marxist critical theorists held that when vernacularists defined the social crisis as a series of prob­lems, social scientists and professional social workers became responsible for patching ­things up. Social prob­lems have to be fixed. Th ­ ere is no inhering subliminal contradiction and thus never a need to enact revolutionary praxis. And, Li claimed, without conflicted real­ity, t­ here are only two options, reformism and devolution. Li was right. Both Sun’s and Ellwood’s position appeared to rest on noblesse oblige. Not just middle-­class do-­gooders but a tiny, evolutionarily superior social elite should resolve social issues discreetly. Their job would literally be to reinstall a credible, natu­ral, evolutionary class hierarchy. While Chinese Marxists integrated the question of ­women’s volition and matriarchal relations of production into a singularly revolutionary theory, Ellwoodian Chinese vernacular sociology minimized ­women’s anomalous position in evolutionary theory and turned it into a Vernacular Sociology  •  1 2 1

mere “social prob­lem.” Thus, while May Fourth vernacularists reified the category of the social prob­lem, Marxists maintained that, far from law and instinct, evolution operated materially through explosive contradictions in social relations of production, and that drove social evolution. Complicating vernacular sociology further, yet another cohort of social scientists arrived on the scene in Shanghai, Hankou, Osaka, and Tokyo. As explored at length in the next chapter, advertising social scientists and advertising agency pioneers spilled a lot of ink and a nontrivial amount of university seminar time debating the social science of selling and buying. In vernacular sociology ­there is constant reference to the truth of ­women. In fact, eugenic philosophy rests on the fact that females carry a fetal h­ uman inside their bodies. They contribute half of all inherited material. They can choose well or force an entire civilization into decline when their natu­ral inclination to choose a love partner is denied. Two core intellectual camps have appeared. Vernacularists argue that ­women’s liberation was a social prob­lem, and since no foundational reason exists to prevent it, a state run by sociologists would liberate all ­women, and evolutionary prob­lems would go away.55 Critical theorists also recognized female centrality and the biological truth of ­women. Their position, however, fused the biological ascent of humanity to h­ uman l­abor power. Society did not just happen for no reason. The logic of accumulation and the excess that ­labor power granted meant that no gap between social and biological forces existed. The ­human body itself changed in relation to w ­ omen’s shifting criteria for sexual se­lection. This put sexual se­lection on par with other Darwinian and social Darwinist strug­gles and the survival of the fittest society, nation, ethnic group, or race. Not a social prob­lem but rather a question of continued revolutionary development and justice for beings whose natu­ral rights are stymied, liberation is in the event of ­women.

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Chapter Four

The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera

Two figures drawn in “public space” (gonggong de difang) gaze at an advertising billboard in figure 4.1, one page of a chapter titled “Advertising” in a 1927 adult literacy primer. The accompanying text declares, Advertising. The joint development of advertising and commerce is extremely impor­tant. Good businessmen often speculate (chuaimo) that using social psy­chol­ogy in all advertising media w ­ ill expand their commercial [success]. For instance, some of the many excellent methods for drawing attention to advertisements are to publish unique new ads in newspapers, send out beautiful calendar poster ads, put lovely hanging posters on the roadside or in public places to draw ­people’s attention, and leafleting (chuandan). If we take as our common objective the development of commerce, then we cannot but take advertising extremely seriously.1

The image includes ads for itself (The Urban Citizen’s 1000-­Character Study Guide, or Shimin qianzi ke), Xin­hua Improved Agricultural Implements, a Newest Stove–­brand coal burner, and a subscription to New Citizens News (Xinminbao) and notices about seed stock, “­women’s products,” and commerce itself. The copy introduced fourteen new words (all complex, requiring up to sixteen pen strokes to write) and put literacy to use in advertising social evolution. Reporting to the U.S. consul in Shanghai in 1932, vice consul J. Ernest Black noted the primer since it was his job to

4.1  ​Pages from “Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujinhui,” in Shimin qianzi ke.

help American businesses get the upper hand over Japa­nese brands.2 As Black noted, literacy was not the key to Shanghai ad culture, but doubtless consumption would accelerate if more ­people could read.3 On the other side of the world, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin had already sensed a no less fateful loosing of commercial ephemera into the world and anticipated that commercial campaigns constituted “the expressive character of the earliest industrial products” and the “actualization” of a modernist historical milieu, society, and language.4 Social phi­los­o­pher Henri Lefebvre held a similar view.5 But placing commercial ephemera into the Chinese treaty port lifeworld took a lot of work, it did not happen blindly, and where it did occur, commercial ephemera materialized the category of society.6 One final generalization: generically, advertising is ephemeral ­because ads have fleeting value. Commercial ephemera appear ­because a com­pany broker buys or rents space to expose a commodity’s brand. Once an ad is published, or in the case of signboards degraded by the weather, its value vanishes. That is the logic under­lying Benjamin’s assertions that ephemera are historically invaluable evidence of the past. It is another reason he valorizes the “sudden image”—or, in my own homage to Alain Badiou, the art event—­and calls the “sudden image” dialectical. This dialectical quality means that 124 

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although the conditions under­lying the ads are incontestably real, the ad’s relation to the past is adjacent, and it does not directly reflect a totalized past; it is not a puzzle piece. Ephemera, caught like pollen in amber, are neither a repre­sen­ta­tion nor a potent ge­ne­tic cause of anything. Their real can only be recaptured historically. Historians must figure out how ads got into the magazine or signboard in the first place, unearth how the advertising industry theorized, psychologized, graphically designed, and situated media campaign strategies. Steeped in social science theory, ad ephemera installed the truths of vernacular sociology, which legibly, publicly, and openly flaunted “­women in society.” W ­ omen in society define what Benjamin called the imagistic (bildhaft) materialist pre­sen­ta­tion of history.7

Ephemera Defined The term ephemera (ἐφήμερα) is part of what in 1961 Philip Babcock Gove called the International Scientific Vocabulary, describing terms created in the nineteenth c­ entury to scientize life pro­cesses and engineered out of anglicized faux Greek or Latin stems.8 Ephemera joins together a Greek term epi, meaning “on” or “about,” and another, hemera, meaning “day,” to indicate the short-­lived mayfly.9 C. J. Chen suggests that the translation in Chinese be fúyóu, adapted from the classic poem, Shijing, also indicating an insect’s fleeting life.10 Each of ­these words denotes a capacious category of objects with short-­lived, inconspicuous, or transitory material and physical forms, in a specific time, in a specific place, and, when we collect ephemera, they are cognizable as metadata or categorical knowledge. The postcard is an obvious example.11 Like the short-­lived insects, ephemera are physical embodiments left in disposable media, recording the everyday lives of time-­contingent, bodily remains that might not other­w ise leave a trace. Historical ephemera presented in this chapter encode social objectives in material form, in fragile remains, a shadow of h­ uman touch. Ephemera generally should prompt historians to appreciate the physicality of conceptual ­orders. Philosophical texts, social theory, and religion all unveil potential truths; the social sciences postulated the truth of society, and ephemera are a material archive where ­these truths smeared into t­ hings. Ephemera—­here, commercial ads—­are amenable to complex archival formatting and are worth resurrecting and fighting over b­ ecause if they came into the world, The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 2 5

then they have a ­contingent temporality and can be ended one day. And that includes sociology itself.12 Commercial ephemera particularly lend themselves to critical restoration b­ ecause generically they build into themselves sophisticated expression and emotional logic, and they fuse past and ­future; we see this latter quality particularly in ad campaigns or story arcs.

The Advertising Industry and ­Women The ad shown in figure 4.2 appeared in Shenbao on March 7, 1920. It anticipated the commercial advertising boom of the next three de­cades and the corporate advertising industry. Evoking Chinese boudoir paintings (see chapter 5), the girl obliquely looks into a hand mirror so that her face is shielded, surrendered to the viewer indirectly. This is a famous Pond’s cold cream ad, and although not the earth-­shattering accomplishment its designer claimed, it does embody professionalized and psychologized modern ad-­design scenario. The text extolls “The Cosmetic Masterpiece!” that Pond’s cream produces. Noting that her skin had been a “wreck” only a month before and is now white and enchanting, the fictional figure attributes her transformation to having applied a modern, branded vanis­hing cream each day. The girl icon in the Pond’s ad had appeared over and over in print media during the 1910s as one of two new-­woman images the prolific sketch artist Ding Song recurrently drew.13 In the images reproduced in figures 4.3 through 4.5—two ­women using phone technology, a girl alone in an enclosed space gazing at herself, or alone painting modern Chinese w ­ omen, and in the final Ding Song image, depicted leaning on a sofa chair to play with her cat— what allegedly shocked readers in 1920 was seeing Ding Song’s characters appear in a commodity ad.14 As figures 4.3–4.5 illustrates, Ding Song drew ­women together. The younger one who appears in the Pond’s ad often accompanies a se­nior modern w ­ oman. The girl sometimes raises a badminton racket or stands in front of a ­water hydrant or an English-­style mailbox. Having seen hundreds of ­these drawings, I still do not see a clear distinction since the older w ­ oman might carry a bird r­ ifle, knit looking out a win­dow, read a newspaper in her study, and is as active as the girl. The point is that Ding Song created ­these ste­reo­types, and other artists appropriated them. In figure 4.6, for instance, the two appear in a sophisticated 1925 image sell126 

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ing Sunlight soap, a Lever ­Brothers product, in a national news media. The party responsible for placing the giant-­scale Pond’s ad was Carl Crow, of Carl Crow, Inc., who alongside C. P. Ling’s Chinese Commercial Advertising Agency (Huashang guanggao gongsi) was one of the “big four” ad agents in Shanghai. Ling and Crow belonged to an industry that mushroomed between 1919 and 1937, when the Japa­nese military attacked China and drove refugees from the eastern seaboard into the interior. According to Su Shangda, writing in 1931, Ling, Crow, and Wang Wanrong (owner and founder of Rongchang Advertising Agency), as well as Vee Loo Advertising Com­pany (Weiluo guanggao gongsi), and the Perme Com­pany (whose owner was Italian), combined forces to accelerate demand for marketing and distribution (the two classic rationales for advertising, à la Harry Tipper) following the 1910s influx of foreign-­branded commodities, including the Japa­nese miracle medicine Jintan.15 Other prominent Chinese advertising figures—­Lu Meiseng, Lu Shoulun, and Zheng Yaonan—­founded United (Lianhe), apparently a business consortium affiliated with the newspaper Shenbao.16 The British-­owned F. C. Millington, Inc., as well as entities such as the Direct Mail Advertising Agency ( Jieyun guanggao gongsi) and Chinese commercial moguls like Huang Chujiu and commercial art poster magnates Jin Xuechen and Ni Gaofeng, worked in the same business environment as the advertisers listed in English-­language Shanghai directories, like M. Tanaka, Richard Chester, J. J. Chollot, and Mr. B. Rosenbaum. Crow and Ling—­like their Japa­nese analogues, cap­i­tal­ist innovators Morishita Hiroshi (founder of Morishita Nanyōdō, also known as the Morishita Jintan Com­pany, the com­pany producing Jintan pills) and Nakayama Taichi (entrepreneur, founder, and advertising genius ­behind cosmetics innovation at Nakayama Taiyōdō, known alternately as Princess Araiko and Club Cosmetics Com­pany [ccc]) in Osaka—­directly and explic­itly employed advertising social sciences to promote themselves and their products, just as literacy advocates pushed commercial cap­i­tal­ist praxis—­reading ads and buying commodities—­into everyday life.17 So while academics and industry innovators harnessed marketing, the psy­chol­ogy of consumption, emotions, and commodity acquisitiveness to social pro­gress, advertisers ­were drawing cartoon images and writing ad copy in weirdly clinical ways, explaining how society worked. Crow’s, Morishita’s, Nakagawa’s, and Ling’s advertising images sought to enlighten potential buyers (recall how the amco girl advertising literalized electric light) by wrapping commodities in stories and design The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 2 7

4.2  ​Large-­scale Pond’s

cold cream newspaper ad by Carl Crow. Shenbao, March 7, 1920.

to further fetishize them, as the California Sun-­Maid raisin brand transformed an available Chinese food, dried grapes, into a precious health import (figure 4.7).18 ­After winning a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, the phenomenally gifted C. P. Ling earned a second ba at the University of Rochester and a master’s in the social science of selling at Columbia University and New York University. At this time the U.S. eastern seaboard institutionalized the social science of advertising, and Northwestern University and the University of Michigan offered additional programs. Ling returned to Shanghai to establish his agency in 1926 and took on exclusive accounts for Ford, General Motors, Coca-­Cola, Philip Morris Cigarettes, aspro (an Australian brand of aspirin), klim milk powder, Horliks, Parker Pens, and Pan American World Airlines. By 1936 the Chinese Commercial Advertising Agency, C. P. Ling Proprietor—­the official corporate title—­also handled Jardine Matheson, rca Victor Com­pany,

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4.3  ​Drawing by Ding Song

of a woman and a girl using a telephone. Min’guo ribao, March 12, 1917. 4.4  ​Drawing by Ding Song

of a girl with braid and mirror. Min’guo ribao, March 22, 1917.

4.5  ​Two drawings by Ding Song. A woman painting, and a girl playing with her cat. From Ding

Song, Shanghai shizhuang tuyong. 4.6  ​Lever ­Brothers (estab-

lished 1885; consolidated into Unilever 1929) Sunlight brand washing soap tableau. Dongfang zazhi, November 25, 1925.

4.7  ​Ad showing Sun-­Maid

raisin girl. Funü zazhi, July 1918.

Cheesborough, Heinz, General Foods, Quaker Oats, Welch’s, and, interestingly, amco. A ­ fter the Guomin­dang government fell in 1949, Ling’s outfit moved to Hong Kong. Ling cocreated practices in order to generate imaginary use values out of exchange. Sellers have often named their product and shared information about its virtue with potential customers. Only commercial advertising in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries had the capacity to statistically test and poll potential consumers using social-­survey methods to demonstrate an ad’s effectiveness, meaning its return on investment. Advertising pioneers w ­ ere early adopters of Taylorist or Fordist theories and production practices. The China-­based Lu Meiseng and his Taylorist counter­parts in Osaka, Japan, spread the dogma of efficiency (i.e., the difference between the capacity of a unit to produce and the projected sales of its products) by translating and circulating new philosophy and demonstrating superiority in practice. But for Ling and Crow, specialized knowledge and the consequent ability to snag international The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 3 1

brand accounts placed them in a dif­fer­ent world than local businesses like Vee Loo, l­ ater part of bat.19 Advertisers gather information just like sociologists. “We make market surveys,” Crow wrote, “speculate on what articles they [consumers] ­w ill buy, how the article should be packed, how advertised, and what merchandising methods should be followed.”20 His surveys invited consumers to learn about imaginary use values, graphesis conveying other scenes of use value, ways to procure branded commodities, and ways to both use them and appreciate their aura. Crow was a keen observer who spotted trends. This helped his business, since agencies h­ andling corporate accounts sold directly to retail consumers in the Shanghai region and by mail order to readers all over China and Southeast Asia, as figure 4.8 advertises. In the early 1920s, Crow was among the handful of pioneers systematizing emotional expression in commodity ads.21 The 1921 Pond’s ad associated femininity, bashfulness, inwardness, self-­love, sexual seductiveness, anticipation (scientific skin care ­will transform my skin and

4.8  ​Sincere Home Delivery

Ser­vice, Shanghai, Funü zazhi 6, no. 3 (March 1923).

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• Chapter Four

reveal my personhood), and the demo­cratic point that anyone can use Pond’s white cream to become a natu­ral cosmetic masterpiece.22 The image featured a Ding Song girl icon set among four cold cream jar icons. Like Mickey Mouse’s ears, the Pond’s jar endured throughout the commodity’s lifetime in Chinese markets, but the shock of the new came when Crow paired a girl cliché and scientific modernity. Since a physiological female figure is a constitutive ele­ment of modernity as such, what he intimated h­ ere, in commercial ephemera, is that the anatomical ­woman is indivisible from the commodity form. Tormented and contested as this binding of ­women to commodity forms became in revolutionary politics, the truth of ­women circled around and around the subjective possibility that generic ­women ­were not just female in a zoological relation to men (sexual se­lection) but became themselves by using or applying commodities; ­women were thus, in a sense, indivisible from the cap­i­tal­ist commodity. The images in figures 4.9 and 4.10 show two versions of female cathexis to a commodity. In the Kodak Film ad in figure 4.9, a sexualized girl figure holds a roll of negatives while a male figure gazes not at her but at the film. In figure 4.10, a female figure mixes Sal Hepatica, a mineral salt laxative branded and sold globally by Bristol-­Myers from 1903; it settled the stomach, cured rheumatism, and eased gout. Sal Hepatica ­woman stares not at the man but at the commodity, yet the scene unfolds in front of a marital bed, its privacy curtains drawn and quilts and pillows neatly stacked.23 Theories about sexual se­lection made ­women responsible for racial health but graphesis in t­ hese ads link ­women not to sexual intercourse but to commodity use and thus to self-­making. Social science claimed the truth of ­women’s material physicality and chapters 5 and 6 ­w ill reinforce this point. But for now, note that female figures in ­these banal commercial advertisings are not other, not objects ­under a gaze, not psychic fantasy, or a medium for son producing; they are not a field, a farm, or a rib. Between 1918 and 1923, the Shanghai-­based Advertising Club of China met regularly to hear lectures on the science of advertising. Major venues like the industry monthly Printers Ink ­were available in Shanghai, meaning that the advertising club had access not only to advertising theory but to trade journals and orga­nizational or operational blueprints. Influential business o­ wners, modern business concerns, and the circulation in En­glish and prob­ably Chinese of the U.S. science of selling indicate that Shanghai elite ad businesses never fell ­behind business practices The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 3 3

4.9  ​A man and a ­woman see Kodak products

4.10  ​A wife prepares Sal Hepatica for her

differently. Dongfang zazhi 23, no. 22 (No-

husband in their bedroom. Dongfang zazhi 17,

vember 25, 1927).

no. 11 (June 10, 1920).

like ­those described in the ­great texts of the advertising age, Walter Dill Scott’s The Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising and The Theory of Advertising, Harry Tipper’s The Princi­ples of Advertising, and Harry Tipper and George French’s Advertising Campaigns.24 Moreover, all larger agencies working in Shanghai and other treaty ports took on international accounts. The apparently Chinese-­owned Dongya Advertising Agency handled the Osaka-­based ccc, for instance. The qualifier apparently indicates that businesses had multinational investors, w ­ ere registered in the United States or Japan, or worked in partnership with larger firms like T ­ oyota Com­pany to create markets for Chinese citizens who owned companies or ­limited investments in llcs. Ling’s efforts to register his com­pany with a Chinese government failed, for instance, and he registered u­ nder U.S. law in Shanghai’s extraterritorial court system. Just as one cannot automatically attribute a nationality to capital or corporate imperialism, advertising agencies also used subterfuges to mask their nationality within a transnational community of interested, profit-­seeking, modernist cap­i­tal­ist entrepreneurs. 134 

• Chapter Four

The social science of selling, like vernacular sociology, presumed that ­ omen’s social prob­lems like illiteracy, dirty clothes, or dry skin, ­were w individual and could be resolved through commodity use. Commodity allows you to modify your race-­body. This story lurks b­ ehind many commercial pleas selling face creams, deodorants, hair products, milk powder, washing soap, chemicals, tonics, liver pills, and so on. Since aspirational middle-­class ­people longed to improve the race, they appeared responsive to medicine brands like Doan’s while living in an older, cheaper world of bespoke Chinese medicinal tonics.25 In addition, advertisers ­were steeped in social theory of sexual difference. They quickly latched onto physiologically correct female icons. U ­ ntil modern times, ­women did not pursue domestic consumption as a natu­ral or gendered duty. Wealth and domestic purchases (clothing, bedding, stoves, foodstuffs) had a longer expected life span. So why would a chemical fertilizer or an electric light bulb rise into the conscious mind in association with a nubile young ­woman? Perhaps, reeling in shock, commodity sellers, like social theorists, returned time and again to the remarkable truth that humanity is split and that, like ­women on the marriage market, machine-­produced industrial cap­i­tal­ist commodities are for sale to anyone who can afford them.

Industrial Psy­c hol­o gy and Selling Theory An event is a po­liti­cally inspired action undertaken to install a newly discovered truth, something ontologically sound that did not exist previously. As ads escalated into grossly public displays of ­h uman physiology, imaginative line artists graphically expanded the truth that advanced w ­ omen live in society. In 1921 Devoe’s Brilliant Oil, an affiliate of Standard Oil of New York (socony), was still ­running a pre–­ commodity revolution ad depicting the product, information, and the brand name (figure 4.11). A de­c ade ­later, Guangyao, a U.S.-­o rigin branded kerosene lamp com­pany, showed a related commodity in experiential terms: social conviviality, intimacy, familism, and heated spaces in elaborate, dynamic, eye-­catching, female-­dominated imagery (figure 4.12). The differences reflected a de­cade of work linking commodity use and h­ uman emotions. As advertising pioneer Walter Dill Scott noted, the more complex an advertising image, the more it arouses emotion and the f­ ree flow of psychological associations. The commodity must be made desirable, The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 3 5

4.11  ​Primitive ad for Devoe’s Brilliant Oil, a

4.12  ​Sophisticated ad for Guangyao brand

socony affiliate. Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 12

domestic lamps, stoves, and cooking burn-

(June 25, 1921).

ers. Funü zazhi 17, no. 9 (September 1931).

and the desiring subject capable of buying. Scott wrote prolifically about how p­ eople cathected, or invested their feelings into, objects, or commodities, and how this bond between the potential buyer and the commodity triggered purchasing. Scott was an amateur Freudian psychologist. In a long psychoanalysis of his own everyday life, he wrote about his unconscious associations on a walk he took, musing about his sweater. As he ambled, his mind shifted to shoes in a store win­dow, to Theodore Roo­se­velt’s shoes, and to generic versus specialized shoes for athletics, business, and leisure. Then he recalled Roo­se­velt, the 1898 Sampson-­Schley controversy over who actually won the decisive ­battle of the Spanish-­American War, Roo­se­velt’s getaway in the Rocky Mountains, the Boer War, a local dinner party where a guest had mentioned Peking, the Siege of Peking, and then returned to Roo­se­velt. Analogously, the Brilliant Oil ad lacked the Guangyao brand’s pattern of familial associations and the feminized, modern warmth and psychic pleasures that commodified domesticity offers. 136 

• Chapter Four

4.13  ​Colgate Gold Head Per-

fume ad. Funü zazhi 11, no. 4 (April 1925).

More insistent claims would unfold in the Japa­nese advertising world, but all advertisers made packaging more impor­tant than the product. Ludicrously literal, a Colgate ad (no doubt a Crow invention) named its product “Gold Head Perfume” (figure 4.13). A product took its name from its own package; it appears at the bottom of the ad, nestling in its adorable box. The text declares that since the perfume is the equivalent of makeup, you should take a moment and sprinkle on some Gold Head Perfume to cover your clothing with its charming fragrance. Compared to Crow’s 1919 girl gazing sideways into her mirror, this one makes direct appeals to the senses; it is even pos­si­ble that, as he boasted, his studio in­ven­ted the prototypical clichéd Shanghai ­woman sitting in front of a Eu­ro­pean vanity completing her maquillage and smiling with self-­recognition—or, as in figure 4.14, smiling obliquely into a mirror reflecting not her face but just her open-­mouthed, toothy smile.26 The Crow prototype aside, of the hundreds of iterations of the mise-­ en-­scène, my favorite is the flit ad in figure 4.15. Established in 1923, originally a Standard Oil of New Jersey subsidiary, flit was a home-­use The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 3 7

4.14  ​Ad showing a w ­ oman’s

bright teeth ­after using Colgate brand dentifrice powder. Dagongbao 85, no. 278 (July 28, 1928).

ddt product, similar to ge’s home electronic appliance market.27 This ad regularly appeared in the Ladies’ Journal, a Shanghai Commercial Press publication, but the flit com­pany distributor, Mustard and Com­pany, had registered in Hong Kong, so the image may have originated in the Millington studio. One of the big-­four agencies was certainly involved ­because flit published similar visual matrices globally using local icons, not all female, meaning Standard Oil had to employ agents with international connections. The familiar objects appear but with more ele­ments: a Japa­nese robe, a French vanity ­table, an Anglo bed accessorized with an electric light, and a ddt “gun.” The modern girl promotes social evolution and supersedes the old female figure with braids and body-­obscuring pants. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ads like this particularly detailed one formed the g­ reat ephemeral drift of girl and w ­ oman advertising in the new media: advertising billboards, hot-­air balloons, blimps, auto shows, slip-in ads to weeklies, the margin space in real estate handbooks, and virtually anywhere a print space could be sold for a profit. By the 1930s, beautiful compositions like the flit ad ­were commonplace, and emotional advertising had become the industry-­wide theory and practice. The media-­saturating Ford car ads of Ling’s agency followed 138 

• Chapter Four

4.15  ​A sophisticated ad comparing an

emotionally taxing and unhygienic old method of fighting bedbugs with the emotionally uplifting modern flit brand ddt. Funü zazhi 17, no. 4 (April 1931).

4.16  ​Ford ad set on the Bund. Dagongbao,

September 4, 1931. 4.17  ​Ford and drayage animals. Millards.

May 28, 1921.

the outline laid down in Scott’s 1908 The Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising. Ford ads all featured the script logo to tantalize viewers as well as cartoon scenes lifted out of modern Shanghai housing estates and associated lifestyle ele­ments like banks, trips down the Bund, and chauffeured Ford sedans delivering lovely ­women to their shopping spots. Ling and Ford cars targeted two demographics. For the first, a female figure—­a modern wife, concubine, mistress, or d­ aughter fulfilling the role assigned in the modern ­family—­drives or is driven to do commodity consumption (figure 4.16). Second, the business buyer got ads that stoked feeling of joy in the ability to haul astoundingly heavy loads, outcompeting donkey-­and horse-­drawn drayage, to truck in materials to building sites, courtesy of the Ford Motor Com­pany (figure 4.17). Class aspirations, never far from the psy­chol­ogy of advertising, are at the forefront in lifestyle advertising, but ­here the spotlight shines on emotional drawings and the desires they sought to unleash.

Variation in Social Science and Body Morphology ­ hether they ­were selling racialized-­blood imperialism, as some Japa­nese W brands did, or natural-­rights imperialism, advertisers preferred anatomically female icons, as did commodity consumers. How is this pos­s i­ble to know? First, where active figures appeared in advertisements, 140 

• Chapter Four

the majority ­were not male; second, female icon drawings became more sophisticated aesthetically than ­others; third, commodities targeting male users (we can never know who actually bought commodities), like watches, “Brill Crème,” masculinity-­enhancing hormones, flashlights, batteries, or cigars (figure 4.18) often have no ­human figure in them at all; and, fi­nally, the majority of ads feature male figures fetishized professional accomplishments like putting in a day at the office (figure 4.19) or studying the new national language (figure 4.20) over objects. In at least one case, the decision to focus on the procreative female body emerged out of brand testing results. The ad in figure 4.21 ran only once in the Japanese-­owned Shengjing shibao, a Chinese-­language newspaper located in Japanese-­occupied Manchuria. The ad copy reads something like: The classiness of Two Gorgeous Girls adornment material! If every­one, young and old, male and female, uses this adornment material ­every day, it w ­ ill absolutely improve your skin . . . ​and absolutely improve your natu­ral beauty.28 This bulky, primitive ad copy listed commodities like scented powder, perfume, jade oil, hair-­anointing cream, and tooth powder. It is a text-­heavy photorealist advertisement, using key terms like civilization. The katakana, or Japa­nese alphabetic inscription, for the Chinese characters shuang meiren pai (Two Gorgeous Girls brand) is the Japanized word for “club,” given as クラブ, flagging the brand’s alternate names, the Club Cosmetics Com­pany, or ccc. Two features are key. First, the copy literally invites w ­ omen and men to use the same, sexually undifferentiated products, and, second, the ad image features two Chinese opera stars, at least one of whom, an anatomically male performer, Mei Lanfang, was a nationalist Chinese theater arts performer who played the ultrafeminine characters in opera repertoire.29 Why did the ad appear at all, and why did it dis­appear? Nakayama Taiichi founded a retail network near Osaka to sell ccc or Nakayama Taiyodo products, including branded soaps, hygiene items, and chemical products. In 1911 the ccc began advertising its “China” brand of products, Two Gorgeous Girls. Like the Morishita Jintan Com­pany, the ccc built corporate imperialism into its business plan, so it strategized lines of products specifically tailored to Chinese social conditions, such as new markets created around the Sinicized Japanese-­ designed products. The com­pany field-­tested its brand name and gradually translated Japa­nese visuals, rhe­toric, a sense of girlness, the emotion of excitement, and an incitement to modernity into a local consumer-­ friendly package.30 Given that the Japanese-­dominated commodity The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 41

4.18  ​Three Alhambra cigars.

Dongfang zazhi 22, no. 20 (October 25, 1925). 4.19  ​Inchcape Shanghai Shipping

Office. Dongfang zazhi 20, no. 9 (May 10, 1923). 4.20  ​Study materials for learning

national language. Dongfang zazhi 22, no. 23 (December 10, 1925).

advertising also relied on the social theory that sexual difference drives ­human evolution, it seems that designers ­were also embroiled in a prob­ lem of feminine per­for­mance.31 As Maki Isaka has shown, Japa­nese “­women in society” or urban, anatomically female subjects confronted an established theatrical preference for drag femininity.32 Just as drag queens proj­ect stylized femininity, anatomically male Kabuki actors had long, creative histories of feminine public expression since ­women ­were banned from public per­for­mance. In the event of ­women, acts to force social ac­cep­tance of physiological ­women acting publicly or in society proved contentious. Kabuki remained a theatrical domain of artifice, just as Chinese opera did for de­cades. Particularly well documented in the Japa­nese case, during the rise of commodity society, so­cio­log­i­cal arguments attached performative femininity to physiologically female bodies, insisting that femininity and physiology occurred together in one body by nature. Theories about the natu­ral femininity of ­women prevailed, perhaps consequent to mass cinema, and the cliché about male performers giving femininity its purest expression declined. When Japa­nese ad strategists tried linking Mei Lanfang to soaps and cosmetics, they ­were calling attention to established conventions in Chinese theater at the very moment when strictures against the per­ for­mance of femininity by physiological females ­were u­ nder attack. Moreover, the ad copy did not disaggregate consumers into male and female; ­there was nothing gendered about soap powder. What made the ad anomalous, even retrograde, was the surge in advertising theory and vernacular sociology ­toward aggregating commodities into sexualized categories, fixing them in hormonal bodies and presuming femininity is exclusive to ­women. A ­century l­ ater, we know ­there is no sexual essence and no reason to believe that femininity arises out of physiologically “female” bodies exclusively, just as we know that morphology is partly a psychic projection, and the qualities of masculinity and femininity may over­ride physiology. I speculate that in both Chinese and Japa­nese variations, modernist disputes over morphology s­ haped themselves around preexisting popu­lar arts. Alternatively, although the long history of Kabuki and Chinese opera may have conditioned the debates over essence and sexuality, consumers preferred the sexualized girl image.33 And ccc advertising speedily resurged with sexually differentiated commodity advertising. Its 1912 ccc “This! This! It’s this!” campaign created a cute girly girl icon to kick off its ­women in society icon.34 A “Who” campaign starring the same icon followed in 1916; Nakayama’s The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 4 3

branding practices immediately stamped universalized cartoon drawings of physiological w ­ omen onto the com­pany’s mass-­market commodi35 ties. The girl-­icon line drawings universalized and particularized specific ­human social characteristics.36 Nakayama planned and executed the strategies himself: testing the drag ­woman, inventing girl figures and a brisk, one-­character slogan style, using multiple corporate names for the same com­pany, drawing “product maps,” and associating his product with Japa­nese trains crisscrossing Manchuria. Like C. P. Ling, Nakayama was a creative advertiser in a moment of tremendous change. On February 11, 1893, the Osaka entrepreneur, cap­i­tal­ist, and civilized, Mencius-­style humanitarian Morishita Hiroshi (1860–1934) founded Morishita Nanyōdō and debuted Jintan miracle pills first in China and then around the world. T ­ oday the com­pany markets the same ­recipe Morishita cooked up in the mid-1890s, but 130 years l­ ater, it cannot make any medical claims b­ ecause it has no active ingredients. It recently resurfaced in Thai markets as a legacy breath mint. Morishita was also a po­liti­cal progressive who wanted to establish a superior-­quality herbal tonic medicine, amass capital, and “make the world a better place through advertising.”37 He accomplished the latter by marketing Jintan magic pills from South Amer­i­ca to Thailand, from Singapore and the Philippines to Abyssinia and Uganda.38 Like Nakayama, Morishita was a Taylorist industrialist, a cultural innovator, an advertising entrepreneur, and a small player in Japan’s statist corporate imperialism. Both belonged to a medium-­sized corporate group from Osaka that was forging print advertising on the Chinese mainland.39 When the Japa­n ese imperial state established the yen zone in its Asian empire (1868–1947), including a fictive l­egal entity, Manchuria, Nakayama, the scion of right-­wing Buddhist sectarians, set up his cosmetics and soap factories in Shenyang, Tianjin, and Shanghai and also in Pusan, K ­ orea, which Japan annexed in 1910.40 Corporations often contracted with Dentsu Advertising Com­pany, founded in 1901 by Osaka native and former journalist Mitsunaga Hoshiro. Dentsu agents bought space in local media and newspapers owned by the British, Americans, Chinese, and Japa­nese in China, including Shengjing shibao.41 Like amco, Brunner Mond, bat, ge, socony, and so on, the Osakans streamlined corporate colonization in Asia. They rationalized ­labor practices and suppressed worker discontent, created surplus value, stabilized the business-­firm plan, accumulated capital, forged consumer markets

144 

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4.21  ​Mei Lanfang. Shengjing shibao 23 (December 5, 1911).

4.22  ​Jintan ad showing a

modern liberated ­woman writing at desk. Shenjing shibao 30 (February 26, 1916).

at home and in its colonies, and made capital efficient; they established domestic commodity markets while limiting po­liti­cal expression.42 Thus, Morishita Jintan’s colonial modernist marketing activities situated horizons of thought and their campaigns i­ magined sexual difference. The image shown in figure 4.22 appeared regularly during the 1920s and 1930s in Shengjing shibao and elsewhere. The top right corner of the advertisement shows the Jintan diplomat icon and the slogan, “Jintan brings you back from the dead and is second to none in the entire world; use this miraculous medicine regularly.” The lower left-­hand corner box announces “Osaka, Morishita Apothecary.” In literary Chinese, between two banner headlines announcing “Enjoying fortune is the most impor­tant key” and “Passes the test for highest quality and given full-­throated praise,” is a statement in smaller font that reads, “­Those who support the Jintan life are t­ hose who conquer fate. One dose is like a first starlight [falling] on the wet soil. Invalids, to become healthy, to become strong, do it with the Jintan medical efficacy, and you ­w ill without doubt startle heaven and rock the earth.” Above the box of the Jintan product, near the electric light, a slogan reads: “Jintan medicine is packaged in a book-­like shape; ­here is an illustration of the ­actual medicine box.” The drawing shows an intensely focused female figure caught inscribing the En­glish words “Jintan book” as she peers into an open package of product. The slogan intimates that the package is a mirror dispenser-­ compact where she can see herself reflected back in relation to the “silver pills,” which are actually the size of bb shot, yet rendered many times larger. What is historically legible h­ ere? A girl positioned in poetic, faux high-­class ad copy sits with the tools of modern civilization around her—­electric light, books, En­glish, modern dress, scientific medicine, exhortations to national fitness, and references to advanced hygiene, with a scientific but national-­sounding or “Chinese” brand—­advertising her physical stamina, internationalism, and selfhood in relation to a commodity.43 The Jintan girl’s cosmopolitanism (electricity, unbound feet, commodification, grace, and taste) and healthy eugenic body are half the story; she has a male partner, a weakened, sickly boy (figure 4.23). They are pictured individually but form a pair. The trope of the enlightened girl reflected in the electric lamp is reproduced in the visual speculum of the boy, who has just found the life-­g iving tonic tablets he needs to turn the corner, transforming from the clichéd, racially degraded, 146 

• Chapter Four

4.23  ​Jintan ad showing a sick boy. Shengjing shibao 30 (January 13, 1915).

4.24  ​Ajinomoto social-­

scientizes msg. Shengjing shibao 93 (March 10,1925).

opium-­addicted “sick man of Asia” into a healthy, sexually attractive man. The copy reads: From in the darkness I see a flash of light, a lucky star opening on a longevity sphere. I basically did an about-­face ­after ­these past few years of illness, as I had been getting weaker and having headaches, belly fire, wheezing lungs, heart skipping beats, and so on. The sickness developed slowly, but once it was at full strength, I had so much pain that I could not do much. I heard about ­people who took medicine or had treatments and still have not recovered just as I had. I was losing confidence in recovery. Wow, ­today how fortunate and lucky that when reading the new newspaper, I saw about jintan medicine and how effective it is in controlling disease. Luckily, I had no idea how effective this medicine would be and how comfortable I would feel a­ fter taking this medicine that I read about in the newspaper.44

The Jintan ads pair a productive and healthy girl with a weak and depleted boy, perhaps to emphasize Chinese racial degeneration and the emasculation of Chinese male figures.45

Two moments of high activity characterize Japa­nese brands’ takeoff. First, in 1895, immediately a­ fter the Russo-­Japanese War, the farsighted entrepreneurs Nakayama, Morishita, Mitsunaga, and Nakajima Masao (a newspaper magnate) plunged into advertising and founded their companies.46 At this point, the social sciences of selling began to be offered in the newly established Japa­nese university systems, just as they w ­ ere at Columbia, Barnard, and New York Universities. Nakagawa Shizuka (1866–1935), for instance, made advertising theory a social science during seminars at what l­ ater became Waseda University and founded the first Japanese-­language advertising research journal; he wanted multidisciplinary approaches (economics as well as psy­chol­ogy) in advertising media to expose social issues.47 Nakagawa is the founder of advertising science at Japa­nese universities. Second, in the 1910s advertising research and the translation of U.S. models into Japa­nese accelerated.48 Iseki Jujirō (1872–1932), an architect of this surge, studied in the United States and translated into Japa­nese Norris Arthur Brisco’s oeuvre on retail selling, retail credit, telephone

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selling, and the pedagogy of selling, including Economics of Efficiency. Iseki, like C. P. Ling, introduced and activated key advertising and retail philosophies. Iseki also used Walter Dill Scott’s 1908 The Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising as well as works by Harry L. Hollingworth and Albert T. Poffenberger.49 ­There is no evidence yet in Japa­nese sources that Iseki knew the Shanghai advertising industry’s favorite, Tipper, the Texaco artist whose Princi­ples of Advertising swayed China-­based advertisers. But as early as the 1910s modernist advertising was so well established that Iseki could, in 1915, restate Hamada Shirō’s 1902 query, “Is advertising a science? Or is it a technique? In other words, is advertising worthy of study as an academic discipline, or does it warrant nothing more than acquisition as a technical craft?”50 Hamada argued that advertising theory was oversubscribing to the discipline of psy­chol­ogy and needed to reestablish its social and po­liti­cal credibility. A consensus emerged that advertising is a social science, notwithstanding its appeal to emotions, and that commodities require social scientific attention.51 Keep in mind what this meant in that moment. Claims about advertising social science unfolded while mainstream Japa­nese vernacular so­cio­log­ic­ al speculation focused on nativist theories of ethnicity and blood. Japa­nese colonial imperialism would collapse in 1945, but its intellectual roots lay in racist blood theory. Early advertising scholar Tsuboi Shōgorō (1863–1913) had been Edward S. Morse’s (1838– 1925) ju­nior partner when the two men established the cryptosciences of ethnic racial identity underpinning Japa­nese anthropology, ethnology, and folklore studies. Morse ­later taught at Tokyo Imperial University and became an apologist for Japa­nese imperialism’s dosoron, the theory of common descent arguing that Japan was a multiethnic country originally settled by Koreans and that since the Japa­nese emperor had once ruled ­Korea, Japan had e­ very reason to annex ­Korea back to itself.52 Thus, Tsuboi’s racist social theory and his advertising interests coincided with Japa­nese social scientific claims to common racial descent, all expressed in sexually differentiated images. And this overlap surfaces in imperialist, corporatized, branded, theoretically sophisticated advertising images, including the Ajinomoto ad in figure 4.24, which shows a Japanized figure, Mrs. Pan, a member of the Manchurian ­Family Reform Committee, who spends her days lecturing about law and who just read about the most famous msg brand in the world, Ajinomoto, which her maid, pictured in the cartoon, has most certainly sprinkled into the meal.

The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 4 9

Evolution, Devolution, and Ad Campaigns The most common large-­scale selling strategy in the 1920s and 1930s was the comparative story ad campaign. Story campaigns explic­itly communicated vernacular scientific truths about species and social evolution in two dif­fer­ent ways. First, we saw in figure 4.17 how individual Ford Motor Cars cells compared an onerous past to a bright f­ uture, as trucks replaced mules. In the early 1920s, amco-­g e campaigns in the business-­targeted periodical Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi) illustrated a ­future when Chinese commodity consumption would reach “Western” levels. Second, and more cleverly, advertisers created a long story by linking numbered cartoon cells, each flexible enough to stand alone but more exciting when linked together to form continuous narratives about China’s archaic feudalism and its evolution t­ oward pre­sent and ­future moments. This ploy’s best example is the decades-­long Cutex campaign premised on how science supplants old, natu­ral, or outmoded skin-­care products. The Cutex story recapitulated a diorama-­like Chinese dynastic history through the Shu Han period (221–263 ce). Each cell adroitly pointed out that while archaic tradition had virtue, beauty culture in the past was not always safe. Natu­ral herbs and dyes harbored dangerous side effects, and ­those selfish, premodern beauties hoarded their secrets, taking them to the grave. As we see in this series of images, Li Zhuang, Han Wudi emperor’s lady-­in-­waiting, whose alabaster jade skin is the issue, and Wang Magu, a Daoist immortal who hoarded an elixir of life, should be condemned b­ ecause in social evolutionary terms self-­grooming products must be shared. Any consumer with money should have the right buy them, ­because all socie­ties have to evolve and move from traditional practices (good then, obsolete now) to universally available scientific products, found in all department stores.53 The Cutex campaign showcased how Chinese society is on the forward evolutionary track, which individual consumers can expedite using science. In figure 4.27, a girl and boy appear in a drawing with text reading: “Coeducation of men and ­women and public intercourse involves shaking hands in greeting since this is now the fashion in society.” In a colonial ballroom (figure 4.28) where girls are dancing with boys, the copy explains how fashion is evolutionary: the ad slogan in this image reads, “In the field of social intercourse, if your hands are coarse and your skin is flawed, ­people ­will laugh at you.”

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I have written a lot about the Cutex campaign and the question of why the past is depicted as not that bad, just not as good as the f­ uture. The ads are not participating in a New Culture Movement style effort to invent a soul-­destroying “tradition” out of the past as He-­Yin Zhen had. Quite to the contrary, the dioramic sequences showcased gradualist, naturalized, historical transformation and hygienic possibilities within ­every consumer’s reach in a progressive society. Mostly, though, the ­women using the products are pleased. Their f­ uture looks good. They can ­handle the new anxiety of public scrutiny. Their bodies are good for plea­sure. The life of modern times opens before them.54

Devolutionary Social Forces It took advertisers time to get ­things right. For example, bat flogged a short-­lived, devolutionary New York brand only once in the Tianjin-­ based national newspaper Dagongbao (L’impartial). Its thirty or so ads are superbly drawn, droll, and full of verbal and visual puns, and each cell encourages readers to anticipate the next. The sophisticated ad layout puts a headline on top and a slogan in couplet form on the left side, providing a contrasting or reinforcing idea. The smaller-­font bloc of text describes the product or gives information about it (it comes in a famous blue tin container, for instance) and extols its taste and value to smokers. The repeating slogan alongside the box of cigarettes says British American Cigarette Com­pany, and above the box in the ellipse is the statement that the price is worth it or that this is a good price for this product. This product series ran only once. The New York ad campaign images depict men with other men in the exact ontology modernists attacked starting with anarchists and gathering steam in the New Culture and May Fourth movements. Clever, wordy ad copy references the hierarchical Five Bonds: monarch to minister, ­father to son, husband to wife, age relations among ­brothers, and friends stacked hierarchically by birth order. In life as in philosophy, t­ hese lopsided dyads bound every­one together in dynamic, naturalized, unequal relationships in cells 4.25–4.28. This is the world that society displaced ­after unfrocking or denaturalizing ­these “feudal” ideas. Each cell refers to filiality, ritual propriety, and fraternity and links smoking to dependability and reciprocity (the qualities a gentleman host would show his male

The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 5 1

4.25  ​Cutex ad featuring Empress Gan of

the Shu Han. Funü zazhi 11 (February 2, 1925). 4.26  ​Cutex ad explaining why brand-­

named products are better than herbal potions. Funü zazhi 10 (October 10, 1924).

4.27  ​Cutex ad arguing that mod-

4.28  ​Cutex ad about dancing

ern coeducation means touching

in a nightclub where you need

men in society and that good skin

to pre­sent your modern best

­there saves you from humiliation.

to society. Funü zazhi 11 (July 7,

Funü zazhi 11 (May 5, 1925).

1925).

4.29  ​One cell in an ad story arc

campaign for New York brand cigarettes drawing an analogy between

4.30  ​One cell in an ad story arc

how well-­bred gentlemen manage

campaign for New York brand

the patriarchal ­house­hold and how

cigarettes showing gentlemen

they choose the best commodity.

in their home library. Dagong-

Dagongbao, May 26, 1919.

bao, May 24, 1919

guests). Campaign polemics explic­itly drew attention to skills gentlemen already had and could apply to choosing a brand appropriate to ­every occasion. Smoking in all of ­these images is like the other skills the elite man masters in his stable, hierarchical, fraternal, predictable lifetime. They analogize from a patriarch’s obligation to naturally establish a patriline, to the gentleman (junzi) easily and naturally selecting a superior brand product. Under­lying all of the cells is that since the patriarch comfortably establishes a ­house­hold, defends against intrusion, and lives a peaceful life with chickens in the yard, he achieves the good life with no effort. This entire campaign plays on the logic that the manly man moves effortlessly in a man’s world to choose the best accessories—­including industrially produced and branded cigarettes—to intuitively fulfill the role of the ­family head. Except for the cigarette and the Manhattan skyline, no manufactured commodities are manifest: no cars, fans, electric bulbs, reading lights, sofa chairs, glass windowpanes, sofas, mirrors, or anatomically female icons. In figure 4.31 the patriarchs are attending a meeting yet the drawing The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 5 3

has no commercial or domestic commodities. And figure 4.32 meditates on ­labor, analogizes physical effort to rolling your own smoke: two gentlemen watch a third man carry­ing a load ­under a banner reading, “Why roll it yourself, why not buy a machine-­rolled cigarette and enjoy good taste with no effort on your own part?” Encapsulated in this jokey but banal style, the pa­norama of the Manhattan skyline strains to suture over the real­ity of how a machine-­made cigarette came to be available to ­these gentlemen in the first place. New York and Cutex brand campaigns are the inverse of one another. The former reified a logic of male sodality, as we saw in figure 4.31, while the latter accentuated a singular figuration, the sexed female’s job of forwarding social evolution. Read in sequence, the Cutex campaign ads show planners creating a long story arc of numbered cells that ram home the social evolutionary argument for why commodity use transforms society and, as in figure 4.32, nature. In other words, the social life of ephemera proves to be as philosophical as Li Da’s discourse on exchange value or Yan Fu’s empiricist theories of the strug­gle of the fittest. Perhaps New York brand dis­appeared

4.31  ​One cell in an ad story

arc campaign for New York brand cigarettes showing a group of gentlemen together. Dagongbao, June 6, 1919.

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4.32  ​One cell in an ad story

arc campaign for New York brand cigarettes arguing that since gentlemen do no physical ­labor, they should not roll their own cigarettes. Dagongbao, May 24, 1919.

b­ ecause buyers found incremental stories about engrained hierarchies funny but boring. A ­ fter all, if you are buying an expensive machine-­rolled cigarette, why associate it with a series of historical clichés? Local gentry-­ class men in multigenerational compounds; men in the study, managing their estates, hosting, examining each other’s art collections, maturing into solid, manly men; but absolutely no men glancing at sexy modern ­women with love in their tiny cartoon eyes.

Surplus Desire, Chemistry, and Carnality Some ad campaigns directly insert carnal male and female figures into the mise-­en-­scène. The routine Daqianmen brand cigarette image in figure 4.33 communicates sexuality in a complex tableau, seemingly the interior of a modern domestic space.55 This ad ran over many de­cades and repeats the truth of ­women, although nothing of the sort appears in the copy. The slogan says that smoking Daqianmen brand makes a happy ­family. Yet the image is peculiarly carnal b­ ecause it is ambiguous. Exactly The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 5 5

what social distinctions govern the relation of the young man, the old man, and the nubile, anatomically correct ­woman? Is this a procreative ­couple looking over the head of a wizened and diminished ­father, happy to see that all is well in their newly nuclearized ­family? Are they ­doing filial duty by having dad over but sharing with his now-­redundant generation the same brand of excellent tobacco that they smoke? Or is the nubile girl the older man’s concubine and the son is looking over his ­father’s head to clarify that in nature he should be her mate? Or does the boy belong to the old man erotically, but the boy prefers the girl, who is perhaps the man’s d­ aughter? Once a nubile female figure enters the scene, possibilities accelerate. The drawing pulls historians into an encrypted advocacy where freely chosen heterosexual congress is, by definition, a eugenic surplus: come hell or high ­water, age-­appropriate heterosexual coupling must take place. No m ­ atter how erotically muddy the trivial Daqianmen image is ­under scrutiny, it advances “the now of its recognizability.”56 Constellations of ambiguously eroticized ­people appeared routinely in a many ads for 4711 brand German body products. In figure 4.34, two men, one in a Sun Yat-sen suit and the other in a tuxedo, sit at a banquet 4.33  ​An ambiguously erotic

Daqianmen brand cigarette ad. Dagongbao, April 17, 1930.

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4.34  ​4711 brand genuine

eau de cologne ad uses a formulaic erotic triangle to sexualize commodity. Dagongbao, October 3, 1931.

t­ able while the procreative ­couple flirts. Is the figure in neotraditional clothing her ­father? Is she choosing between an old husband and a young erotic object? What carnal relationship is the threesome, a constant fixture in all ad culture, indicating? In fact, the association of ­women’s eugenic choice, individual ­will, commodity desire, and desire for sex became so casual in advertising culture that national, international, and local brands came to associate increasingly vulgar depictions of the agile, in­de­pen­ dent, and eroticized girl with modern society. Surplus erotic desire highlights why New York brand is asocial and retrograde, while Daqianmen smokes or Kotex ads are progressive; society is predicated on ­women and men having sex. Given that vernacular sociology particularly presumed that eugenic procreation accelerates social and national evolution, Kotex, Tampax, and an apparently China-­based brand, Sanitary, w ­ ere advertising in the mid-1920s and placing menstruation, hygiene, and commodity together in the mise-­en-­scène. All brands

promised to replace allegedly unhealthful, self-­fashioned menstrual products with scientific, disposable, absorbent sanitary pads since, according to the ad, homemade, recycled products are harmful to female reproductive health. But multinational sanitary pads are not surprising. Socially expressed desire, drawing on Freudian pop theories, is a graph or indicator and encodes time. ­These ephemera are Benjaminian dialectical images at a standstill, harboring the “nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike.”57 Drug products that have no active agents, like Doan’s and Jintan, have been studied. But as the physiology of sperm and eggs became open knowledge, and a broad swath of new commodities with known chemical properties flooded into advertising culture, fidelity to the event of ­women got further encoded into advertising culture. Medicinal commodities become “vectors of modernization and medicalization,” b­ ecause hormones and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals reinforce sexual difference and offer upwardly mobile consumers a chance at physical modernity never before imaginable.58 Vari­ous products w ­ ere marketed as relieving menstrual pains and gynecological conditions: narcotics like the Schering German line, which belonged to Bayer and marketed a barbiturate called Veramon; hormones ­under the name Satyrin; ste­roids that the Swiss ciba brand named Agomensin/Sistomensin (figure 4.35); a Japa­nese brand, Vagitoran (figure 4.36); a German Hemogen Musculosine; and the French Cryogenin-­Lumiere and Hemogene Tailleur, an anti-­inflammatory ste­ roid.59 Giving chemical-­sounding names to commodities led to products like the Hemogen drugs, a solution of aluminum chloride hemostatic to treat gingivitis, and products that relieved neurasthenia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and many other maladies. In much advertising graphesis ­women’s contribution to social pro­ gress lay in personal hygiene. A hygienic modern ­woman actively bathes herself or showers regularly. Unlike her ­mother and grand­mother, she bases her life practices on clinical scientific truths about female sexual maturation, hormonal menstrual cycles, egg-­sperm conception, pregnancy, and antiseptic, postdelivery, self-­care.60 The repetitive invocation of the sanitary and healthful qualities of machine-­made, brand-­identified, antiseptic menstrual and medical products found explicit scientific reinforcement in articles appearing alongside the ads in journals of opinion like the Ladies’ Journal. The linking of menstruation and hygiene could not be more explicit, for instance, in Wei Xin’s 1923 translation of Wil-

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4.35  ​ ciba ad for a hormonal menstrual

regulator with the pseudoscientific name

4.36  ​Vagitoran brand chloride, salicylic acid,

of Agomensin/Sistomensin. Funü zazhi,

acetate, and glucose compound for vaginal

September 1, 1931.

relief. Shengjing shihbao, December 3, 1918.

liam Robinson’s work on eugenic improvement.61 In this environment the menstrual pad is an ideological entity linking social improvement to a ­woman’s sexed body.62 Vaginal bleeding is physiology, and Kotex a brand; physiological fact and industrial commodity combine in the commercial ephemera that flowed through everyday life in cheap newsprint and magazine images.

The Social Lives of Sexually Selecting Advertising Girls Christopher Norris has argued that a “truth event” is “the discovery of hitherto unthought or unsuspected ontological resource.”63 The truth ­here is sex-­difference sociology, and it subsumed Chinese intellectual life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inside the ontological resource are social theory, sexual instinct theory, advertising social science, and hormonal phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, all publicized in everyday newspaper and magazine ephemera. In vernacular sociology’s foundational categories and in young intellectuals’ explosive personal statements, praxis, too, was

The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 5 9

often conscientiously individualized. The material gathered in this chapter is commercial graphesis that opened ways to establish that “­women” is a novel set of commands authorizing a modern being, dif­fer­ent yet as central to social and natu­ral evolution as ­human men. Ads themselves are not generative. They do not make t­ hings happen. But they facilitate, solemnize, or ratify that commercial capitalism worked in Chinese treaty ports to open up a novel fealty to an imminent ­f uture where the true humanity of biological, procreative, hormonal ­women ­will fi­nally be recognized. As the Cutex and the New York branding comparison showed, commercial ephemera form dialectic images and thus make ontological claims. Images communicate a departure from the comfortable (or not, depending on your sex assignment) gentry life celebrated in the failed New York brand campaign and indicate readers’ and gazers’ willingness to be pulled into being modern. Omnipresent commercial art bound commodity capitalism to the truth of ­women ­because it made claims: if you buy and use Vagitoran you are a physiological ­woman living large in a changing society. The next chapter more fully analyzes what kind of thinking was g­ oing on in the artistic commercial ephemera. ­Here it is enough to underline the actions taken among new commercial cap­i­tal­ists who ­were dynamically linking iconic females, machine-­made commodities, and w ­ omen’s modern life in society. Electric lights and advanced ­women, all-­purpose ­family cars with females driving, ­these pre­sent high-­anxiety indications that a cap­it­ al­ist modernity is around the corner. Nonetheless, commercial claims are not po­liti­cally inert; Carl Crow sold Colgate toothpaste but his laisse-faire po­liti­cal beliefs did not establish airless hegemony. As Li Da, He-­Yin Zhen, Ding Ling, Lu Xun, and Marxist and anarchist thinkers all insisted, even if the truth of ­women had revealed itself within an industrial and commercial cap­it­ al­ist revolution, cap­i­tal­ist culture could not be allowed to define or limit the truth of ­women. Strug­gle over truth and ­women’s ­violated natu­ral rights far exceeded the peculiar cul-­de-­sac of treaty port consumption culture, which I argued, conflated ­women with brand commodities. Advertising creatively generates imaginary use values, the other scenes of use value, so while ­there is no doubt that capitalism and corporate imperialism upset older ideologies and made the case for ­women as social beings, this is only the beginning of the story. In the event of ­women, militants step forward to declare what ­woman is. This discussion has suggested only how the truth of the generic proce-

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dure of commercial ephemera, immanent and singular, could launch colonial modernity in treaty ports. W ­ omen’s presence in society guaranteed a plausible ­future for the Chinese nation-­state. ­After 1919 theories about society ­were inextricable from commercial drawings of society in pictographic ads, lithographs, photo­graphs, and illustrations.64 Any advertising drawing of a female character with a commodity in the same frame is a cryptograph for ­women in society.

The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera  •  1 6 1

Chapter Five

Nakedness and Interiority

Conscious life activity, Karl Marx observed, regulates humanity’s estrangement from nature. Evolutionists w ­ ere correct that “the animal is immediately one with its life activity” but wrong about h­ umans ­because we live by social praxis. Social evolutionary theory strug­gles to explain how h­ umans, particularly w ­ omen, manifest consciousness at all, given ­women’s reproductive burdens. So, Marx noted that while only ­humans possess strategic, cumulative self-­awareness, we continue struggling to grasp what self-­awareness is.1 Among Chinese social theorists, ­women’s interiority, ­women’s desires, and qualities distinguishing ­women from men posed prob­lems that also become apparent in visual art. A generation ­later than He-­Yin Zhen, the modernist painter Pan Yuliang (1895– 1977) addressed the plea­sure princi­ple as she painted naked ­women’s erotic gaze. In commercial art, females gaze at commodities, at consumers, or at themselves. Modern high art, however, featured the nude. And in this moment theorists stepped forward to suggest that Sigmund Freud’s theory grasped the conditions of ­women’s abjection. Why seize on Chinese modern art and philosophy to make vis­i­ble and intelligible a truth about t­ hese w ­ omen’s self-­awareness? B ­ ecause visual art elucidates a general crisis. Suddenly May Fourth intellectuals found it easier to declare what art was not than what art was.2 Part of the trou­ble was that modernist high and low art shared a mise-­en-­scène of naked and seminaked female figures. The mise-­en-­scène of the self-­gazing or the

out-­gazing, self-­accepting erotic w ­ oman, from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass to classics like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, shocked every­one. Pan painted orientalist female nudes that directly referenced Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque.3 But she lived a marginal existence in Paris b­ ecause she, a female painter of female nudes, could not live in Shanghai.4 A former concubine from the demimonde, she promoted a truth about ­women’s erotic plea­sure in being gazed at, at a time when Chinese critics and viewers generally had trou­ble countenancing pictures of naked w ­ omen at all, not to mention images who stared back at them.5

Art, Commercial Art, and Awareness In January 1919 Lu Cheng engaged the famous phi­los­op­ her Chen Duxiu in a discussion about commercial art, which both the younger and the older man hated. Cultural figures from Feng Zikai, Ding Ling, and Lu Xun to Shi Zhecun piled on, excoriating commercial culture for sexualizing the female form. Although ­these critics had a tough time identifying what exactly modern Chinese art was, they repudiated eroticized commercial drawings, declaring them not art.6 A lesser known con­temporary, Lang Shu, however, insisted that industrial art and advertising presented something genuinely new, a perspective I adopt in this chapter. Lang proposed a new category he called commercial art (shangye yishu), bundling together industrial arts, store-­window displays, signboard ads, advertising icons, and commodity packaging. Commercial art, he argued, had a short life, which ratcheted up its charisma since advertising and other ephemeral arts had to maximize sensory impact. Lang made advertising’s ephemerality an attribute of alluring commercial arts generally.7 Lang Jingshan (1892–1995) began life as an advertising agent.8 His Jingshan Advertising Agency ( Jingshan guanggao she) supported his multiple wives, ­children, and extended ­family.9 While relatively ­little concrete evidence regarding his business operation survives, Lang’s main commercial account was Tiger Balm. He drew the images, and his third wife, Yang Huiya, also a former advertising agent, handled the business end.10 He is significant b­ ecause he began in commercial advertising and ended as a Chinese modern high-­arts pioneer in pictorialist art photography. Like Ulrich F. Keller and Peter C. Bunnell, Lang wanted photography to borrow “concepts, styles, subjects, motifs, artists and works of art” Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 6 3

from bourgeois oil painting; to achieve that end, he pioneered “composite” photo images.11 Using dif­fer­ent negatives, he imposed foreground, middle-­ground, and background dimensions photographically.12 This created a Sino-­European landscape, and from t­ here he reworked modernist Chinese canonical aesthetic theories, touting aesthetic formulas that paint­ers had used for millennia to position rocks, trees, and ­water but in a Eu­ro­pean style three-­dimensional frame.13 Lang did this alongside Peking University president Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), who also attempted to synthesize Chinese and Western essences in neo-­Kantian philosophy. Cai pop­u­lar­ized semiphilosophical ideas in modern Chinese thought and had an oversized impact on trends, but as many have pointed out, he put his own spin on interpretation. Along with Kantian aesthetics, Cai promoted a version of Hegelian philosophy that transformed dialectics into a theory of national evolution: “a world pro­cess, not a pro­cess of thought.”14 And Cai, who studied ­under Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and acquired German psy­chol­ogy and psychoanalytic sociology, taught Wundt’s so­cio­log­i­cal philosophy of emotion.15 Consequently, Lang adapted Cai’s nativist aesthetic art philosophy.16 “We must,” Lang wrote, “fully express our own characteristics, and the unique interests and literary qu [taste or intrinsic fascination] of we Chinese through the camera.”17 Lang was part of complex con­temporary discussions about technology, genre painting, and national essence involving an entire cohort, including Cai and Liu Bannong (1891–1934), an activist who had or­ga­nized experimental photo artists and was the group’s aesthetic guru. Liu taught that since modern philosophy and technologies aspired to be universal, artists had to know what Liu called the “ ‘me’ involved,” meaning to him the artists’ cultural essence. This aesthetic debate authorized Lang Jingshan’s composites to be art but also gave cover to pinup girls that Lang also published ­under the rubric of art, just like Hu Boxiang, another member of Liu’s circle, who drew bat ads to support his photographic art, including pinups.18 As an artistic photographer, Lang Jingshan took formal studio portraits of the painter Pan Yuliang; her con­temporary Tang Yunyu, a female oil paint­er; and the male modernist Xu Beihong. Significantly and unlike such studio portraits of paint­ers and artists, Lang’s naked-­girl images rarely reciprocated; they tend to gaze away into the consumer’s gaze.19 He often photographed nubile girls in states of sexual arousal; some draped with transparent scarves, appearing like deer in a forest landscape or holding musical instruments, and most are situated along 164 

• Chapter Five

5.1  ​Lang Jinshan’s art image Meditation. Professional-­quality portrait said to be the first surviv-

ing Chinese art nude photo­graph, 1928.

the fuzzy border separating masturbatory image and formal modernist nude in figure 5.1.20 Lang was distributing nudies, images in which w ­ omen appear disinterested in the viewer yet are not gazing in a mirror or painting themselves. Compare the nude to the Five Continents spermicide girl in figure 5.2. Locking onto the viewer, the ad w ­ oman is merry, and the advertisement has a silly side b­ ecause her tiny, cartoon-­like face looks outward to summon potential consumers. Five Continents was a successful Chinese-­owned medical phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany, and it placed ads in all media, although the ads usually presented lower-­voltage female images than this one. In contrast to Lang’s naturalized female animal, this happy, naked, pedagogic ad figure is nakedly transforming the social world. Not only does the ad copy reference the physiological or menstruating w ­ oman, the girl is in on the joke; in the mise-­en-­scène, she appears to be an aware social actor. Holding the advertising signboard across her breasts, she integrates her own image into the message as she informs readers about Mussolini, fascism, sexual health, sanitation, eugenics, and mindful breeding.21 The Five Continents ad is social ­because it is incomprehensible outside the conditions that made it legible to contemporaries: the viewer Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 6 5

5.2  ​Five Continents brand

naked girl icon holding a eugenic signboard ad. Funü yubao, October 10, 1936.

had to know a lot to fully get the point. Sperm, eggs, ovarian tubes, female sexual se­lection, the avoidance of conception during each ejaculation, industrially produced condoms, Margaret Sanger’s 1922 visit to Shanghai, medical sequencing of births for the sake of the race, and so on: while ­these are biomedical commonplace now, they w ­ ere novel in the 1920s. The same holds for nakedness. The female figure in the contraceptive ad is naked but not in the same way Lang’s images are. Lang stripped consciousness away from the models in his photo-­representation of ­actual ­human bodies. The ad girl showcases ­human racial perfection. While the drawing may strike the viewer as sexy or not sexy, funny or vulgar, the girl has long legs, a nice hair bob, a merry smiling visage, and a seductively dancing character. You might reproduce happily with this naked person. It also seems a particularly domestic carnality compared to Lang’s masturbatory images. In figure 5.3, the dilemma that Lang confronted us with takes the shape of a caustic joke. In this cartoon an editor is asking

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5.3  ​Cartoon satire drawn

by Fei Ying showing an “art” photographer shooting a nude. Manhua 7 (n.d).

­ hether the photographer has finished shooting the model for the cover w image; the photographer answers that he has not shot a single image. ­W hether art or commerce, all ­these images convey fantastic scenes. Particularly in the case of the contraceptive drawing, the ad graphically conveys a situated “material real­ity,” in Teresa Brennan’s terms, ­because we know that chemicals r­ eally do prevent conception. That fact is a material and yet not a natu­ral real­ity: knowing about chemistry does not change how ele­ments interact. And yet aware adults, male and female, can buy chemical products and interrupt the most archaic and primeval mammalian activity t­ here is, procreation. Contrary to social scientism’s truisms, the material world is infused with ­human consciousness and emotion or, in psychoanalytic terms, libido. The truth of the Five Continents commodity and its ad image are the “concretization of fantasy;” ­actual in both a material sense and also a psychic one.22 In a social world where the Five Continents girl looks right at the consumer, self-­awareness of species-­being means that any consumer can buy protection. The ad girl

Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 6 7

offers an improved, maybe even an evolved, so­cio­log­i­cal and historical ­future. Lang’s image, in contrast, foreclosed female self-­awareness and left out the role that nakedness plays in individual self-­consciousness. Nakedness in his figuration is mechanical since the object of a gaze, the female model, is unaware of herself and cannot meet the gaze of the viewer, cannot engage, even erotically. So while high and low art share a common mise-­en-­scène—­the naked, mammalian, anatomically correct ­human female—­how ­these images operated was historically significant and dif­f er­ent.

What Was Art Thinking? In his discussion about how art expresses truth, Alain Badiou announced that he would abandon the question “What does this mean?” Aesthetics provides a conventional answer to the question of what an image or object means, he argued, which makes art not only context dependent but also inconsequential. It is hard to answer the question “What does this image mean?” Lang Jingshan’s work “means” that he reworked a Kantian, archaic Confucian, modernist theory and shot pictures and photo-­ paintings of naked girls to demonstrate his Chineseness. If, however, the question is about what art does and how images or graphs, photos or calligraphy, reach into social life, then “art is itself a producer of truth, [and we ourselves should] make no claim to turn art into” an illustration of the past or an adjunct to a Kantian aesthetics.23 Inaesthetic theory, to the contrary, insists that art is active out in the world. It has its own truths, and that eventually forces historians to accept art’s active, insistent, irreplaceable truth. Approaching art inaesthetically means figuring out how “to think what happens in [art]”: what truth the “art” or art pre­sents; what is singular about that truth that could not be put into words, science, or m ­ usic; how it changes the social world; and so on.24 ­Here Lang Shu’s category of commercial art comes back into play. Commercial advertising art, being itself a real (i.e., it does not reflect a real outside itself and is neither a repre­sen­ta­tion nor an effect), activates truths that are irreducible. Commercial ephemera have power­f ul ways of communicating social truths, and they (at least in the form of advertising images) can also be approached as generic commercial art.

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Pepsodent, Psychoanalysis, and the Self-­Gazing ­Woman In figure 5.4 an anonymous commercial artist has drawn a ­woman at her mirror, toothpaste in one hand and a brush in her other, her robe casually falling off her shoulder and exposing her breast. Pepsodent Com­pany (an llc founded in 1915 and guided to international profitability by the advertising genius Claude C. Hopkins) began advertising in developing Chinese markets immediately ­after the com­pany’s founding and, just like bat, did research directed at domestic and offshore marketing.25 Pepsodent turned a profit and along with o­ thers saturated the Chinese advertising environment. The image in this ad may have been redrawn from the pages of the New York Times or other U.S. papers, available in Shanghai at many offices and still held at the Jesuit archive in the Xujiahui district of Shanghai. The motif of the self-­gazing girl at her mirror or vanity ­table appeared in many product ads for many branded commodities, so that is not the point of comparison h­ ere. H ­ ere the question is Lang Shu’s argument that commercial art is art. The Pepsodent image illustrates the point about genre and ambiguity: one image is art, but the other usually is not considered artful or as belonging ­under the rubric art (which is why Lang Shu’s claims are so significant). One represents within itself a commodity, toothpaste, an internally referenced brand logo, and situates the iconic girl and commodity in a dynamic relation, a mise en abyme, where the girl gazes at herself gazing at or using a commercially branded commodity. The high-­art equivalent, depicted in figure 5.5, is a painting by Wen Yiduo (1899–1946) of a dissipated, full-­lipped young w ­ oman gazing into a French mirror in a private bedroom suffused in blue light.26 It is the modernist poet’s only extant painting, the o­ thers having perished in the war, but he had trained at the Chicago Art Institute before turning his attention to reinventing Chinese poetry. He was assassinated in 1946. Wen’s image is suprageneric, in the sense that when it is viewed alongside banal Pepsodent advertising ephemera, high and commercial art blur the line distinguishing the high and low arts. Fundamentally, each image has the same content, which I call a mise-­en-­scène, though the phrase is often associated with film critic Andrew Sarris, who adapted it to refer to how movie sets are dressed and to the way auteur cinema inhabits filmic conventions and fuses authorial vision to visual frame.27 Considered cinematically, particularly in the numbered story arcs discussed in the

Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 6 9

5.4  ​Pepsodent ad showing a w ­ oman at her

vanity ­table. Dongfang zazhi. April 1925. 5.5  ​Black and white photo­graph of Wen

Yiduo’s only surviving oil painting.

previous chapter, the ad cell becomes a freeze-­frame.28 Wen’s image allegedly depicts an eighteenth-­century girl poet, Feng Xiaoqing. Wen drew it for his friend Pan Guangdan (1899–1967) to illustrate Pan’s famous set of publications that culminated in a widely read book, a Freudian case study of Chinese femininity.29 Actually, Wen painted a generic, morphologically Eu­ro­pe­anized erotic body, so although the figure purports to be an eighteenth-­century Chinese ­woman, ­there are no period signifiers in the painting: no tiny feet, painted face, jewels, cloistered bedchamber or drawing studio, or maidservant.

Pan Guangdan, Freud, and Female Narcissism “Freud quietly asserts,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once noted, “that at the origin of the hypothesis of separate ego and sexual drives ­there is no grounding unity but only a riddle . . . ​of biology.”30 The riddle of biology—­ instincts, physiology, basic mammalian biology—­does not resolve the 170 

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question of h­ uman self-­awareness in Freud any more easily than in Marx. Freud accepted, as all moderns have, that we are mammals and have instincts to manage, so he posed a dilemma he could not resolve. Sexual energy might be inherent in humanity, as in ­every mammal, but psychic development, the “hypothesis of [the] separate ego,” and separation (What does ego separate from? Does it remain separate? How do anx­ i­eties and contradictions afflict it?) remain problematic. The European-­ educated intellectual polymath Pan Guangdan (or Quentin Pan) directly addressed Freud’s riddle using Narcissus and Echo to argue that Chinese ­women suffered from educated narcissism. This move opens the general prob­lem of female self-­awareness and secondary narcissism. A chronic Freudian dilemma is w ­ hether narcissisms in ­women are a helpful restaging of psychic energy, a maladaptation, a banal condition, an enabling condition, a disabling fixation, a fundamentally distinguishing mark of the feminine, or something e­ lse. Freudians promise that males and females experience existence differently: although their internal lives consist of the same collection of drives, urges, and blockages, they are acquired in dif­f er­ent order and in dif­f er­ent relation to primary caregivers, m ­ others and f­ athers. This is among the many reasons to take Pan seriously. He insisted that physiological w ­ omen had a singular psychic life: yes, they ­were perverts, but they possessed a separate ego and consequently a genuine self.31 Just as we are ­human ­because we have species-­being, in the event of ­women, theorists like Pan addressed theoretically and philosophically the question of subjectivity (ren’ge). While Spivak has a lot more to say about this type of phantasmagoria, as do I, Pan was making female narcissism into a cultural issue.32 In 1924 Pan published a short article, originally drafted in 1922, in Funü zazhi (the Ladies’ Journal) ­under the title “Research on Feng Xiaoqing” (Feng Xiaoqing kao). In part 1, “Historical Xiaoqing,” he listed known facts about the poet: a fateful meeting with a nun who warned Xiaoqing’s ­mother to keep the girl illiterate; her marriage as a child concubine into the Feng ­family; Feng’s first wife’s vendetta against Xiaoqing; her close relationship to a girlfriend, Yang; Xiaoqing’s death at seventeen and the jealous wife’s destruction of Xiaoqing’s poetic legacy; the girl poet’s eventual entombment; and the enshrining of her few remaining poems in a male literary cult.33 In part 2, “Xiaoqing in Lit­er­a­ture and Sexual Psy­ chol­ogy,” Pan drew on Freudian psychoanalytic technique to diagnose female narcissism. Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 7 1

“Sex is the origin of religion, lit­er­a­ture and art,” Pan argued; indeed, he continued, psychoanalytic psychologists go so far as to say that “sexual desire explains every­thing about h­ uman be­hav­ior.”34 Yet, among the va­ri­e­ties of abnormal psy­chol­ogy that Freudian analy­sis has identified is narcissism (yinglian), which in Xiaoqing’s case meant that she had ­declined heterosexual and homosexual intimacy in f­ avor of self-­gazing activities, particularly writing poetry, and had directed her libido into a pattern typical of many educated Chinese ­women. In an homage to Freud’s speculative biographies, Pan highlighted Xiaoqing’s importance as an iconic example of “Chinese society’s attitude t­ oward ­women.”35 And this is where ­things got particularly in­ter­est­ing. In Pan’s theorization, the Chinese big or feudal ­family system blocked Xiaoqing’s natu­ ral ave­nues of erotic expression. As He-­Yin Zhen had anticipated in her philosophical anarchist feminism two de­cades ­earlier (see chapter 1), the old-­fashioned f­ amily warped all h­ uman sexual expression but w ­ omen’s sexuality particularly grotesquely. In Pan’s hands, Xiaoqing became not just a case study of a sexual perversion but a critical autopsy of China’s sick culture. Declining to blame the victim, Pan sought to use modern psychiatry to diagnose culturally perverse developmental norms in Chinese lit­er­a­ture and art. In two subsequent longer versions of his study, the 1927 “An Analy­sis of Xiaoqing” and the 1929 Feng Xiaoqing: A Study in Narcissism, as well as a number of smaller afterthoughts published in the 1930s, Pan further developed his insights.36 It is unsurprising that the consolidation of the event of ­women in modernist theory involved a psychoanalytic appreciation of ­women’s collective, internal personhood. Psychoanalysis made its appearance in Chinese treaty ports at the same time as European-­style art nudes and commercial design. As ­earlier chapters have noted, Qu Qiubai and ­others ­were relentlessly attacking the same putrid feudal culture and took similar positions regarding how feudalism stifled ­women’s personhood. The mirror, the commodity, and the w ­ oman figure exhibited the endless spiral of self-­referential gazing, clearly on display in the fetishized images of the Jintan pill girl and the ge bulb girl.37 But the ­human sciences in the 1920s and 1930s frequently attributed narcissism to Chinese ­women’s interior real­ity, their consciousness. W ­ omen’s interiority appeared to consist of psychopathy, an inability to flourish, and eventually a death drive. Commercial ephemera are sticky in this way: categorical narcissism attaches itself to naked female figures in high art (if Lang Jingshan’s

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composites qualify, if you accept Wen Yiduo’s art nude as art) and commercial art in the endless mise en abyme. But ­there is more to Pan’s theory of Chinese female narcissism. Literary critic Jingyuan Zhang has pointed out that Pan believed that Xiaoqing’s death was brought on by self-­mourning, seeing as how she “mourned for her lover—­her Self, considered as the Other—­and wished her image, not herself, to live forever.”38 In Brennan’s terms, this is the precise definition of secondary narcissism in which the “ego drives and the sexual drives are on the same side” and narcissism is “self-­preservative precisely ­because [it] preserve[s] identity.”39 In this stream Xiaoqing preserves her sense of self only in her refusal to become something other than herself: she is not a wife, consort, d­ aughter, lover, or child. In Brennan’s argument, subjectivity supersedes life: her logic rings true ­here ­because we do remember Xiaoqing although she died young and left ­little ­behind. Jingyuan Zhang considered this, instead of secondary narcissism, “a displaced master-­slave dynamic in which Xiaoqing as a slave submits to the law that she is to satisfy the desire and enjoyment of the Other,” meaning she is trapped b­ ecause the Other is the self.40 That is why, according to Pan, when Xiaoqing opened herself to systemic abuse, she is said to have exercised perverse w ­ ill. Pan does say that Xiaoqing chose to ignore all the other conventional possibilities open to unhappy concubines. She chose not to remarry, not to become a nun, not to follow Buddhist self-­ renunciation, not to take a female lover, not to fight for her husband’s attentions, but instead to open her own twisted pathway to death. She suffered from “abnormal psy­chol­ogy”; that is, she exhibited in a tortured way the natu­ral germs of a normative ­human, female, emotional interiority. She was a self, just not one that should be further countenanced. Xiaoqing’s obdurate erotic drives created a singular agency even ­under ­these most difficult conditions. Martyr to a perverse ­family romance, she still possessed a core inner drive, a female personality. In effect, Pan used this case history to publicize his view that evolutionary eros worked as forcefully in ­women as he believed it worked in men. Wen Yiduo painted the portrait of Xiaoqing to illustrate Pan’s sophisticated ideas about femininity and consciousness. Both men speculated about self-­awareness, or interior consciousness, in females of the ­human species-­being. I phrase it awkwardly ­here ­because it is impor­tant to keep in mind the larger agon all artists confronted in the 1920s and 1930s. In all ­these cases, the question revolves around how femininity works, and if

Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 7 3

t­ here are prob­lems (the bad Confucian tradition, the big-­family system, patriarchy, sexual misbehavior, the social prob­lem, individual hateful men, capitalism, and so forth), then a diagnosis and a cure could be laid out. The prob­lem is that Wen’s drawing is absurdly commercial. It could be construed as lewd, even lewder than the Five Continents contraception ad. And while the Pepsodent ad is not technically brilliant, ­there are dozens of gazing-­women ads far more artful than it, ads that are as artful as Wen’s painting. Boudoir ads for Lever B ­ rothers’ Sunlight Soap, Colgate dentifrice, Ding Song’s drawings of nationalist w ­ omen, and the scene presented in a flit insecticide ad are all artful commercial images replete with mirrors, self-­gazing w ­ omen, and libidinized commodity objects.41 The conventional commercial rendition in the Colgate ad calls into question Wen’s claim to high-­art mastery and suggests, to the contrary, the omnipresence of a commercialized mise-­en-­scène. In the event of ­women, ­women’s interiority and its pathologization happened all at once. Pan went on to be twentieth-­century China’s preeminent eugenic phi­los­op­ her and a specialist in sexuality and ­family relations.42 Nationalist Party “secret agents” assassinated Wen in 1946 just a­ fter he eulogized his comrade Li Gongpu, a Communist, who had been killed in exactly the same way.

Colgate Tooth Powder and Female Secondary Narcissism The mise-­en-­scène of the ­woman in her boudoir has high-­art pre­ce­dents. But a pre­ce­dent does not determine what images mean in the now. Pulling pre­ce­dents out of the long Chinese history of visual art helps to underscore differences, in fact, b­ ecause what is being thought h­ ere, the twentieth-­century female nude and particularly the commercial advertising images, is not the same as what was being thought in an image during the Song (960–1279), Ming (1368–1644), or Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Figure 5.6 shows another toothpaste advertisement, this time for Colgate, which appeared in elite magazines like Dongfang zazhi (Eastern miscellany) in the late 1920s. The image of a young ­woman using a Eu­ro­ pean palette and easel has Song-­dynasty (and other Chinese) pre­ce­dents. Art historians w ­ ill notice t­ hese pre­ce­dents almost immediately. A paper image rubbed off a bronze mirror depicting a learned a female artist in her boudoir shows femininity split into painter and child minder, each vividly depicted in a well-­appointed study (figure 5.7).

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5.6  ​Colgate girl painting

herself. Funü zazhi 11, no. 9 (1925).

­Women in a Pavilion and ­Children Playing by a Lotus Pond shows the ­ oman amid her scholarly paraphernalia, changing the baby’s diapers w before returning, one imagines, to her books, calligraphy, or painting.43 Next is the familiar mise-­en-­scène of the learned, scholarly ­woman in her boudoir. Figure 5.8 is a portrait of Xichun, it comes from an 1839 strike of Hongloumeng (The dream of the red chamber), still circulating in collotype form as late as 1921. The Colgate ad’s visual singularity also nods to Ding Song’s con­ temporary female figures. In a 1917 Min’guo ribao (Republican China) image (figure 5.9), the ­woman is wearing distinctive pants and a high-­collared smock and confronts an easel holding a square canvas; to her right is a vase of brushes, palette knives, and trowels. But in the ad the self-­painting painter is depicting a learned female artist with her head oriented ­toward the viewer, her gaze cast downward t­ oward her reflection in the mirror as she paints herself.44 This suggests the immediate pre­ce­dent is Du Liniang painting her own image while gazing in a mirror (figure 5.10).45

Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 7 5

5.8  ​Collotype of Xichun painting in her 5.7  ​Song dynasty mirror rubbing.

studio, taken from 1839 block print. From the

From the collection of Martin Powers.

collection of Martin Powers.

Many observers have pointed out that in the drawing Du, the heroine of the beloved opera The Peony Pavilion, glances away from the viewer per literati convention.46 The image has a virginal bed, a mirror, painting implements, the maid Chunxiang, and the artist herself. As Chunxiang looks out at the scene from ­behind her mistress, her perspective catches the gaze of the self-­portrait, as well as Du’s reflection in the mirror, setting up a four-­point gaze among the ­women and the images, while closing them off from the viewer. While no literal wall exists, the drawing has sealed the interior space from scrutiny using a systematic geometry of interfemale gazing. The twentieth-­century Colgate ad brings this drawing to mind, but the commercial art image is or­ga­nized differently. Its lyric does not animate an a­ ctual opera scene, though it nods to operatic pre­ce­dent, and it absolutely does not replicate the issue lying squarely at the center of The Peony Pavilion, which is a meme: Is this portrait of my body wasting from desire my perfect corpse or my resurrected ghost?47 Like Xiaoqing, Du died for love (in Xiaoqing’s case her lover was herself), and on her way out, Du created a self-­portrait intended to guide her ghost back into the world, should her lover return. ­Here a crucial break occurs. Far removed 176 

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from the dilemma confronting Du with regard to sixteenth-­century dynastic conventions regarding coordinate axes, or three-­dimensional ontology, the commercial lyric reads: [To the tune “Yue hua ying.”]

A delicate hand paints a self-­portrait, The head looks back and forth. So marvelous and slender! Hardest of all to capture: the two rows of shining teeth. Just like two rows of strung cowries, they add to her attractive appearance. The white paper lacks the splendor to depict their glow; Rare it is to have teeth like ­these, A reason for pride. Whoever knew that they ­were produced by h­ uman effort, By the daily use of colgate’s ribbon toothpaste! 48

The young w ­ oman’s mimeses of her own bioself (natu­ral teeth, scientifically enhanced) and her pro­cess of self-­capture in a square—­silver backed with a tain—­European-­style mirror, using a three-­legged easel and thumbhole palette, indicate she is painting herself in a Eu­ro­pean perspective.49 The metaphysics of the advertising image play on the alleged relation of nature and scientific repre­sen­ta­tion. Moreover, while the horizon for Du is death, and her self-­portrait is for her resurrection, the commercial image’s horizon is the box of product just outside the girl’s framework, the mirror. This self-­p ortrait offers not death and resurrection but immediate physiological self-­enhancement. The preponderance of a girl, a mirror, and a commodity in commercial artworks, though maybe not always as conceptually sophisticated as in this ad for Ribbon Dental Cream, repeats the dynamic of the continuous f­ uture moment and structures a situation where animal life and not death, flesh and not spirit, Eu­ro­pean (or even Bergsonian) vitalism and not a death drive, breath and not resurrection, is at stake. Moreover, taken together, the images form a situation, a “presented multiple,” where the real of art proposes a truthful accounting of a situation.50 And what about secondary narcissism? In most Freudian philosophical traditions, all subjects have the experience of realizing they are a self unto themselves, so primary narcissism must occur for ­human individuation to take place. In Lacanian philosophy, this is called the mirror stage. Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 7 7

5.9  ​Drawing by

Ding Song of a girl painting herself. Min’guo ribao, March 5, 1917.

Reencountering oneself as a projection for the second time occurs (as in the Five Continents ad) but can be deadly. Pan fixed on the phenomenon of female ­will and narcissism but placed Xiaoqing inside a drama in which the female subject could exercise only negative ­will and in the end preserve herself only by killing herself. In this regard, Pan echoed Freudian lessons about individual self-­awareness but never blamed Chinese ­women for their compulsive, secondary, deathly narcissism. Rather, Pan made the case that the society around them was so claustrophobic that death was a form of rational self-­preservation. 178 

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5.10  ​Tragic

heroine Du Liniang painting her death image. Tang Xianzu, “Mu dan ting hai hun ji,” 1617. Ming Wanli 45, Taiwan National Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Like Xiaoqing, Du chose death over life, but to my current knowledge, Pan did not reference the opera. Du was a celebrated cultural figure in an established poetic and musical history, and she died for love. The iconic “girl poet” in a long, though peripheral tradition of artistic adolescent girl deaths, Xiaoqing died over surplus self-­knowledge: she read too much. All the girl-­gazing and mirror-­gazing images are narcissistic. But the advertising Colgate girl celebrates her identity or self-­consciousness and her w ­ ill to life, her knowledge that we are social animals and that using domestic commodities can improve one’s natu­ral, organic, anatomical Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 7 9

body. The primary social relation in play in all of ­these girl and w ­ omen images is that of self to self. Freud’s question of how psychic life is related to animal instinct can be resolved many ways, and in the Colgate ad, the psychic or interior experience is self-­possessed, life-­affirming power. It was impossible to be in society (the truth a ­century ago in con­temporary Chinese treaty-­port commercial culture) u­ nless a ­woman grasped herself to be ­under her own command.

The Psychic Life of Commodified ­Women ­ ese self-­gazing w Th ­ omen images suggest that it is the mise-­en-­scène of the self-­regarding girl itself that warrants interpretation as art. The mise-­ en-­scène is not a repre­sen­ta­tion, and it is not a context. Alain Badiou’s insight about what art does opens ave­nues for interpretation, even beyond the already noted formal consistency linking Pan Guangdan’s psychoanalytic philosophy, Wen Yiduo’s illustration of that philosophy, and the generic, coextensive self-­gazing girl. Some might argue that Pan’s interest in the self-­gazing or narcissistic w ­ oman reinscribed older, conventional Chinese brothel lit­er­a­ture, moving it out of the demimonde and into the nuclear f­ amily.51 ­These scholars have a point; t­ here are always pre­ce­dents.52 Just as twentieth-­century advertising images sometimes referenced eighteenth-­century classical poetry, they also alluded to eighteenth-­century prints and nineteenth-­century lithographs, not to mention drawings and photo­graphs of, and news reports about, the late Qing public courtesans. Pan inserted learned discussion about Euro-­American psychoanalytic theory into his article and expanded on his points in ­later publications to account for a native tradition of poetics and criticism that had accreted around the poet and her admirers.53 They all have pre­ce­dents. Pre­ce­dent aside, what is being thought ­here is that the commodity makes normal or normative femininity pos­si­ble. In the relation of a commodity (toothpaste) and female cloistering (­here Pan agrees with He-­Yin Zhen: patriarchy kills!), life in public view using commodities is liberating and enlivening. Our species-­being is singular b­ ecause in the social relations of production we make t­ hings and extend our lives into more and more sophisticated arrangements. Hence, putting a commodity in the scene allows the image to open out onto a common plane of visibility where the viewer—­and not the maid—­completes the cir­cuit 180 

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of meaning. The nineteenth-­century image depicted a static scene that referred back, not to a real­ity, but to an opera, a theatrical per­for­mance whose temporality would become clear only once the artists took the stage. Wen Yiduo’s picture makes sense in a situated moment of thinking where the mise-­en-­scène of a half-­clothed w ­ oman cuddling a commodity references biological female narcissism. But Wen’s w ­ oman and the Colgate w ­ oman are thinking about a f­ uture in which their natu­ral teeth w ­ ill shine forth brightly and female seclusion and sexual repression w ­ ill end forever. The Colgate girl is thinking about her ability and w ­ ill to extend her self socially in an age of mechanical reproduction, commodification, and fetishization. She literally draws a new self, applying chemicals to her teeth and brushing linseed oil and mineral pigment onto canvas. This association of the commodity and the girl subsisted in the new media for several reasons. Xu Junjie and I have both argued that product advertisers actively created new markets and drew on new clichés to power sales.54 In the ads showing mirror-­gazing girls, not only did prosthesis (the extension of the body using means neither cultural nor natu­ral) put ­women’s teeth onto the public stage, but chemical toothpaste improved on the natu­ral order. Fi­nally, mirror-­gazing ads starring w ­ omen promised a ­future in which technical implements ­were intelligible, available, applicable, and affordable. The presented multiple of the seventeenth-­ to twentieth-­century mise-­en-­scène gives the appearance of a kind of universality to ubiquitous, banal recitations, and not repre­sen­ta­tions, ­because they did not represent anything in par­tic­u­lar or, better said, not anything in the material historical world. The subject’s apparent universality (Are not all w ­ omen the same? Is not a Chinese w ­ oman just a ­woman?) is heightened ­because a citation has occurred. But the citation is not to be confused with a repre­sen­ta­tion. That is how the truth of the generic procedure of commercial art, understood h­ ere as a commodity cartoon, can be immanent both to an i­ magined past and to an explosively emergent event. Many have noted that Walter Benjamin’s sense of the historical promoted an act of “awaken[ing] congealed life in petrified objects” or blasting the real stakes out of ephemeral remains.55 In his oeuvre this is known as immanent critique, or the theory of the dialectical image. To grasp how ­things make sense, Benjamin forwarded a complex idea that the criteria of critical judgment in art should be generated out of the work itself and that the critic should reveal t­ hese in a landscape that is neither Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 8 1

formalist nor rooted in some ­imagined past. It should roll out a sense of formal and experiential excitement, a now that art embeds in itself—­a bit similar to Badiou’s inaesthethic. And by the dialectical image Benjamin ­imagined a graphic, material fragment emblematized with its own po­liti­ cal contradictions.

The Graphic Arts and the Event of ­Women The generic conventions separating high and low art collapsed ­toward the end of China’s imperial period. The conventional advertisement and the pre­ce­dent art image demonstrated confusion about generic bound­ aries but at the same time offered a common mise-­en-­scène.56 A bit strangely, ­these ads forward Qu Qiubai’s dream of a mimetic world of scientific repre­sen­ta­tion. The presence of anatomically correct female figures in vapid commercial art reminded viewers day and night about ­human physiology. Moreover, ­these ads secured, as noted before, a common plane of visibility or a mise-­en-­scène inviting public recognition. Any literate person could see how advertising and w ­ omen consumers would make China stronger and better able to compete against imperialists. The late Qing reformist phi­los­o­pher and activist Tan Sitong (1865– 1898) wrote, “Man and ­woman . . . ​differ only in ­those few inches where their reproductive organs are placed.”57 That turned out to be a minority opinion. Tan was executed as a consequence of his po­liti­cal and intellectual work in the late Qing reforms. The few inches of difference become, with psychoanalytic attention, magnetically formidable. The issue of sexual difference and efforts to syncretize physiology to think truthfully had engaged Chinese thinkers from Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, Zhang Taiyan, and Liang Qichao to the foundational sociologists Qu Qiubai and Li Da and the vernacularists whose media speculation ratified theories about consumer society. An image where a modern ­woman extols branded toothpaste is legible ­under the conditions of corporate imperialism, in the ruins of an older philosophical order. The generic ad thinks about the commodity and the ­woman together. It fuses them. Pan’s psychoanalytic narcissist case study fused the real of Chinese ­women to the universalizing claims then being made internationally, that w ­ omen are h­ uman subjects and have rich (if perverted) internal or intimate lives. An event consists of agonistic, po­liti­cally inspired acts to install a newly discovered truth. In the event of ­women, the truth at stake was 182 

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the evolutionary mammal, physiological female’s humanity. Popu­lar social science always risked a default into instinct theory and the ever-­ fascinating realization that ­humans are mammals. Yan Fu avoided the question of h­ uman consciousness altogether to stress the evolutionary instinct for lebensraum and complex theories about ­human consciousness as twentieth-­century thinking confronted riddle a­ fter riddle. While it is a cliché that Freud introduced theories of ­human consciousness in relation to the discovery of the unconscious, in fact he never resolved the modernist question of ­human self-­awareness, and neither did Pan, except in the po­liti­cal sense of “What is to be done?”58 Thus, while Freudian theory posed this question but could not provide an analytic solution, Pan’s theory of Chinese ­women’s narcissism argued that only one option remained, and that was to change the terrible cultural conditions in which sensitive ­women read themselves to death. Pan thrived u­ nder Mao socialism u­ ntil 1957, when he lost high offices in the Anti-­Rightist Campaign. Persecuted during the G ­ reat Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), he died in 1967. In 1967 a strug­gle broke out over a version of this same question, which was not resolved then, ­either. I think it has not been resolved anywhere yet.

Po­liti­cal Action in the Event of ­Women The now-­banal modernist truth is that the bioge­ne­tic, hormonal, expressive female body changes in social relations of production and the longue durée of evolutionary time. Every­one in the strug­gle analyzed so far concurred on another part of the truth of ­women: that ­women are categorically “victims of oppression” who “declare” and are “part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed.”59 Marxist and vernacular sociologists, ­legal reformists, and Marxist and bourgeois nationalists shared the expectation that modern Chinese ­women had a right to life, liberty, autonomy, and self-­awareness in ser­vice to the state. ­There was no way around this. One could conceivably double down on in­equality and argue that it has value, but you could not ignore modernist facts about the power of the patriarchy any more than you could question humanity’s mammal origins or physiological sexual difference. May Fourth vernacular sociology called in­equality a “social prob­lem” and promoted an orthodox view that in­equality proliferated in the Chinese feudal f­ amily, patriarchy, painful body modification, the marriage Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 8 3

market, infanticide, polygyny and the hoarding of ­women, and unhygienic conditions for sexual reproduction. Perversely strict codes for gentry ­women’s respectability crushed and sublimated female sexual expression, as He-­Yin Zhen had anticipated and Pan Guangdan declared. ­Women’s victimization was the cumulative result of feudal social prob­ lems. And as social science vocabulary expanded, so did critics’ ability to excavate and describe oppression in so­cio­log­i­cal terms. Moreover, when reformers imported effective technologies for fighting ­women’s victimization in the 1920s, they directly addressed the physical body. Fixes included industrially produced technologies like contraceptive pessaries, chemical spermicides, the rubber contraceptive cap, and gynecological surgeries for birth canal emergencies. Practical tools against the Chinese feudal ­family reinforced the truth that ­human bodies are irreducibly corporeal and that modern hygiene can improve and resolve social prob­lems. When p­ eople declare a new order, they are acting to rescind an older order. The event of ­women does not rest just on the revolutionary assertion that w ­ omen are part of species-­being, central to the strug­gle of the fittest (in national terms); it also breaks a hole in the old order. Historians know that pre­ce­dents to the event of ­women existed, but a pre­ce­dent does not cause a new truth. For instance, Francesca Bray has written extensively about taking control of sexual reproduction. Gynotechnics, or everyday knowledge about social relations, sexual reproduction, and social practices, was widespread in the millennia from 1000 to 1900 ce. ­People had an arsenal of medicines, practices, and procedures to address all gynecological prob­lems from abortion to pregnancy and childbirth. Historians also know about elite, dynastic ­women’s scholarly networks, gentry w ­ omen’s extensive reach outside the domestic sphere, and their interventions in ethical theory and literate culture over the millennia. Susan Mann, voicing a consensus among her scholarly generation, notes that premodern elite Chinese ­women often lived comfortable, engaged, rich emotional and intellectual lives; although they w ­ ere barred from government ser­vice and could not take the civil ser­vice exams, they learned with boys and found among their kin and class talented men and ­women to instruct, teach, and play with them. Mann also focused attention on debates over the subject of ­women in Confucius scholarship, particularly historiographer Zhang Xuecheng’s (1738–1801). Male elites, Mann showed, recognized kinswomen’s ethics, abilities, and limitations and knew their traditions in poetic, dramatic, and ethical expression as well as 184 

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in calligraphy and scholarship; sometimes t­ hese creative literate w ­ omen ­were t­ hese men’s own kin or wives.60 But the appearance in a Song-­dynasty bronze mirror of a mirror-­gazing ­woman did not cause anyone to draw a Colgate tooth-­powder ad. At best, the mirror-­gazing ­woman was a citation; pre­ce­dent and causation are not the same t­ hing. Although seventeenth-­century scientists Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek found microbes when they used their microscopes, no one, including themselves, realized that some microbes are infectious pathogens. That discovery occurred two centuries l­ ater, in the 1890s, when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered how infectious disease works and chemists began applied experiment to commodify, brand and market chemical products. Analogously, while Chinese men’s sympathy for the discomfort their ­mothers, wives, ­sisters, and d­ aughters suffered is recorded, that sympathy did not cause modernists to discover ­women to be socially victimized: pre­ce­dent does not create new ­things or cause ­people to adopt new truths.61 New truths are declared and installed po­liti­cally. At issue ­here is how the new truth got installed, declared, or simply realized as being incontestably true. The truth of Chinese w ­ omen’s social victimization and potential eugenic power was established in the late Qing dynasty and the Republican period, when p­ eople began to act on natu­ral science and to accept social facts. Old social expectations (foot binding, for example) rapidly shifted from being a banal fashion to being singular to the Chinese race and disgraceful in comparison with other countries. Modernists, socialists, cap­i­tal­ists, fascists, missionaries, and colonial subjects all believed that society and its prob­lems caused Chinese ­women’s victimization.62 In the journal Funü shibao (The w ­ omen’s eastern times), for instance, educated and privileged Republican w ­ omen instrumentalized themselves. They presented their exemplary selves and made the case that victimized Chinese w ­ omen should participate in the new commercial, medicalized, scientized, pro-­woman modern society. ­These forerunners had a lens or way of seeing a reformist role. In other words, the event of ­women was always about social justice, the physiological body, and the demand that ­women w ­ ere entitled to autonomous social lives.63 The search for self-­actualization among educated, middle-­class female reformers began in the final quarter of the nineteenth c­ entury and by the mid-1920s included well-­studied figures like Lü Yunzhang (1891–1974), an activist and po­liti­cal liberal. Th ­ ese are the “new w ­ omen.” Lü’s critical policy theory divided Chinese ­women into two populations, the traditional and Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 8 5

the modern; among the traditional w ­ ere the rural, undereducated, illiterate, and uncivilized masses. She accused them among other ­things of self-­ abnegation, which she argued would retard Chinese social evolution.64 To vanquish traditional restraints, Lü fought for w ­ omen’s education, civil rights ­under new laws, and a national effort to create more modern ­women to take active roles in the national community and shoulder civic and national responsibility. Unlike the figure of the modern girl, new ­women seemed less engaged in consumer culture ­because they appeared in the de­cades before World War I and had fewer consumption options. They largely focused on the national prob­lem, which is why historians used to refer to them as nationalist feminists. Historian Shaoqian Zhang has floated the idea that this new way of thinking about w ­ omen might be called body engineering (shenti gongcheng). As intellectuals and patriots encountered vernacular so­cio­ log­i­cal ideas about race and society, they started arguing that Chinese ­people should engineer a population with stronger bodies and minds. The word shenti is a modern calque (so is the term engineer, for that ­matter) meaning the biobody. Modern Chinese brings into usage a social-­scientized calque, shenti, to replace an older, inescapably haunted and philosophically charged term, shen. Shen had many meanings and played a metaphysical role in premodern philosophy and medicine, ­because it was believed to mediate between the earth and the heavens. We saw this classical triadic construction in the opera The Peony Pavilion and its suicidal heroine, Du Liniang. Unlike shen, however, the shenti was “the object of knowledge,” or “a vessel for objective knowledge amid the construction of a politically-­desired social order.”65 And in modern Chinese it meant ­human or species beings. Social engineering and feminist social engineers acted on the shenti and, as Shaoqian Zhang points out, sought to “establish a new relationship between the nation and the individual” and “reshape each citizen in line with the requirements of the nation.”66 Part and parcel of the consensus about ­women’s central social and physiological importance to po­liti­cal revolution, parallel to the changes traced in this book, the category of the physiological body became the solid base for social reform and revolution. Anarchist feminist w ­ omen in the late Qing and early Republican eras acted on their truth, but ­there is no chronological, po­liti­cal sequence to show for it. The generation of new ­women and ­later the modern girls reached historical legibility acting on truth. While they, too, shared the general consensus that society victimized ­women and that ­women 186 

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needed to take responsibility in the new civil order, activism split or­gan­ i­za­tion­ally into social reformists and social revolutionaries. The largely middle-­class w ­ omen’s movement u­ nder the Chiang Kai-­shek regime brought individual elite ­women into the medical, ­legal, and teaching professions; ushered them into modern secondary education; and modernized a hybrid l­egal system to regulate w ­ omen’s marriage relations. The Guomin­dang ­legal code reform of 1929–1930 particularly addressed property, marriage, and divorce laws. U ­ nder the changing regulations, ­women arguably lost some of the protections of the old-­school patriarchy, but they could expect to exercise new powers in marriages of choice and legally enforced monogamy ­because the new laws banned concubines and second wives. Being a wife was professionalized, so, as in many movements of this kind, child management shifted onto the new ­woman’s shoulders.67 The Chinese Communist Party (ccp) acknowledged ­women’s social oppression, too, of course, but it targeted proletarian w ­ omen and factory workers and experimented with strategies to or­ga­nize them. The party fostered a movement-­based, female activist subculture where educated ­women thrived. While targeting female industrial workers was somewhat successful, the Northern Expedition (1926–1927) shocked every­one ­because it showed how effective mass organ­ization of ordinary—­that is, rural—­women could be. The Northern Expedition took place u­ nder the auspices of the First United Front, which meant that the Communists and Nationalists held a truce long enough to form a national army, ­under Chiang Kai-­shek’s leadership, and march north from southern most China to Shanghai, disabling local warlords and attempting to centralize a national state. The “bloc within” focused on mobilizing and educating rural p­ eople about sovereignty and their own status as citizens. Communist strategists Wang Huiwu (1898–1993; Li Da’s wife) and Xiang Jingyu (1895–1928; wife of rural Communist leader Cai Hesheng) played roles at this national level. Provincial-­level ­women Communists, according to historian Christina Kelley Gilmartin, mobbed the route that the Expeditionary Army took, organ­izing effective ways to agitate for w ­ omen’s revolutionary participation, including mass popu­lar cele­brations of March 8, International ­Women’s Day. In village ­after village, ccp female activists worked to raise w ­ omen’s social awareness and to educate them about their natu­ral and social rights.68 In 1927 the Guomin­dang carried out a coup d’état against the Communist bloc. The iconic short-­haired, educated Communist girl became Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 8 7

a par­tic­ul­ ar target for rape and well-­publicized mutilation and extermination campaigns. In the immediate post–­W hite Terror (1929–1931) period, the ccp’s surviving leadership began its famous improvisations. Mao Zedong, working with the collective leadership of the ccp, started figuring out how Marxism could lend itself to a rural strategy and formed a Red Army made up of poor peasants. As they fled extermination in the cities, ­these remnants established the first rural “soviet” state, and in 1931 the ccp laid down basic laws and po­liti­cal mobilization strategies for ­future Communist soviets. Over the next two de­cades (1927–1947), the ccp would establish many of ­these social laboratories. In 1934 the Nationalists’ effort to annihilate the Communist movement once and for all drove the ccp army out of its Jiangxi stronghold and onto the Long March. Fleeing north into the border provinces of Ningxia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, and outer Hebei at first, the Red Armies and po­liti­cal operatives settled into a long period of New Democracy, headquartered in the northern Shaanxi town of Yan’an. ­Here the policies that came to characterize Maoism waxed and waned. Maoism is a variant of Marxism and included a set of practices called the “mass line,” which amounted to a feedback loop in which the Central Committee set tasks for local organizers with a finite time frame and then evaluated the results. Some policies demanded ­labor mobilization (the spinning and weaving campaign, or pulling w ­ omen out of the domestic space and into fieldwork, for instance), while o­ thers raised or lowered land taxes according to how the government was using landholders to boost grain production or to stabilize small commodity markets. The overall goal was to reor­ga­nize social relations of production, provide mass livelihood, open markets for food and domestic supplies, and steady an economy on a war footing that could support both the standing army and village-­based guerrilla forces. This general policy paid more attention to the w ­ omen’s movement at the village level than any other po­liti­cal party in the country ever had. In fact, the backbone of the Maoist New Democracy economy and policies was the Marriage Law. First propagated at the founding of the Jiangxi Soviet, over the de­cades the Marriage Law has been rewritten around changing circumstances but never altering its core focus on monogamy, divorce, parity, ­children, and property. To this day, the Marriage Law guarantees Chinese w ­ omen the right to self-­determination in marriage, ­family, and social life. To defeat Japa­nese aggression and, in the long term, win the eventual civil war against the Nationalists, the ccp drafted guerrilla-­style P ­ eople’s War strategies resting on support for soldiers’ 188 

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dependents. To constantly adjust its tactical purchase on long-­term goals, the government used social surveys to focus on ­family and marriage relations and adjust around war­time exigencies. Fusing liberation language with economic realities and the social prob­lems of the ­family and prosecuting a re­sis­tance war, Mao policies moved village ­women into structured, compulsory social participation. Strategically, income from w ­ omen’s spinning and weaving on the village level helped to stabilize the rural economy and provided, using wage l­ abor, the clothing needed by soldiers in the standing army. Social ­labor policy also sought to change personal life ­because spinning ­women earned a salary, increasing their power within the ­family. Complex strategies with multiple aims drew w ­ omen into social experiments with civil equality, basic sanitation, self-­awareness, health campaigns, and in some degree an armed militia. Through literacy, self-­respect, communal work outside the immediate ­family, wage ­labor, and po­liti­cal praxis, the ccp and its adherents sought to reinvent and revolutionize the so-­called social prob­lem. The ccp correctly anticipated that ­women’s liberation, in ideological, practical, and material forms, had to lie at the heart of social revolution. A practical feminist consensus remained intact throughout the War of Re­sis­tance: modern Chinese ­women would be, by this definition, liberated. Which groups and social classes ­were legitimately included in the rising po­liti­cal subject, Chinese ­women, changed during the years of revolutionary war. But in this regard, the ccp never lost its connection to the 1920s.69 ­People expressed new conditions in commercial art and ephemera and theorized them in international Marxism and sociology, social evolutionary ideas, and the early twentieth-­century consolidation of the ­human sciences in Eu­rope, the United States, and Japan and their colonial holdings. When commercial artists and advertisers recruited ­these images, cited them, and reinterpreted them, this may have resonated with readers’ conventional expectations, but it fed that trope back in the shape of something new.

The Event Redefined So far I have defined the po­liti­cal loosely. The question has never been ­whether w ­ omen w ­ ere victims but rather how emancipation should be engineered. Yet while po­liti­cal figures accepted that the truth of ­women Nakedness and Interiority  •  1 8 9

rested on social ­factors, ­there was never a Pauline figure, a single individual whom feminists and modernists could point to, in the way that Christians did to St. Paul, who allegedly grasped the living God of Christ and declared his being universal. This suggests that fidelity to a discovery does not need to be mysterious or uncanny. On the contrary, while Chinese modernists concurred on the fact of mammalian procreation, they took vari­ous paths to explore how sexuality, perversion, race, eugenic development, the prob­lem of ­w ill in female subjects, and so on worked socially in society, and they strategically planned flexible tactics that, in the f­ uture anterior, would structure policies in villages and w ­ hole provinces living in Communist territories. The strug­gle to disentangle w ­ omen and the commodity, however, has an overt po­liti­cal history. This book’s final argument highlights the life-­ threatening po­liti­cal stakes that a strug­gle over the institutionalization of the truth of ­women ended up having. Actors strug­gled over the relation of ­women and the commodity culture where ­women had emerged onto the horizon of history. The or­ga­nized Maoist movement relied on the promise of justice to w ­ omen. But, as it turned out, power­ful individuals disagreed over what kind of truth po­liti­cal action should reify. A po­liti­cal act may or may not have a sequence or clear chronology pitting known enemies against each other. In chapter 6, the strug­gle to separate ­women’s truth from commodity culture and to invent another way to liberate victims of patriarchy can be witnessed playing itself out within the Communist movement.

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Chapter Six

Wang Guangmei’s Qipao

At 6:30 a.m. on April 10, 1967, the Red Guard Jinggangshan Regiment, established on September 24, 1966, opened the first of its “strug­gle sessions” against Wang Guangmei (1921–2006) to prepare for her public trial “in front of the masses.”1 By the late 1960s, the Chinese Communist movement had spent half a c­ entury throwing off feudal constraints. Po­liti­cal castigation of semicolonial cultural forms skyrocketed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Convinced that China should end “semifeudal, semicolonial” cultural residues, revolutionary students sought to dramatize bourgeois femininity and rework class relations and the cap­it­ al­ist commodity form itself. Wang became exhibit A for the evils of commodity fetishism.2 A brutal, ugly, and extreme conflict over po­liti­cal practice in Maoist ­women’s liberation, the ­trials resonated globally from Peru to India, the United States to France, the Philippines to Myanmar. The Red Guard’s bob-­haired, makeup-­free young w ­ oman, wearing decommodified clothing (usually army gear), sometimes armed, abruptly materialized to become a hallmark of ­women’s liberation movements globally. A life-­and-­death strug­gle, an immanently structured, ideologically delimited environment of mass youth mobilization set the larger stage for rationalities that are horrifying in retrospect, yet seemed absolutely thinkable and completely actionable in that moment. Moreover, in the wake of the Global 1960s, a Thermidorian revulsion to Maoist physical and rhetorical vio­lence and an ex post facto repudiation of it erupted,

on the grounds that revolutionary politics had ­v iolated ­women’s natu­ ral sexual difference. ­Today, fifty-­five years a­ fter the strug­gle over Wang’s dress and pearls, the truths put at stake in the event of ­women remain unresolved.3 ­Woman is a po­liti­cal subject in Maoist language. By the 1960s, morphologically or biologically delineated female persons had long since come to define Chinese w ­ omen’s po­liti­cal visibility. Chinese Marxist sociology before Maoism had originated with the truth that social and species evolution originated in mammal reproduction. But visibility invoked a problematic truth: only po­liti­cal subjects can act on truth voluntarily to declare themselves to be ­women, which is how Maoist liberation theory empowered po­liti­cal subjects to inflict physical vio­ lence on female “feudal ele­ments” and perhaps a reason why crowds of enthusiastic witnesses attended the public strug­gle against Wang. A de­ cade following the events analyzed h­ ere, Wang’s chief accuser, Comrade Jiang Qing, received the death sentence for her role in t­ hese politics, and the official policy of the ­People’s Republic of China repudiated the sexual injustice waged during the now largely discredited Cultural Revolution.4 ­After liberation, the ccp’s victory in the civil war (1947–1949), it completed national land reforms and installed two battle-­tested laws (the ­Labor Law and Marriage Law) and a court system and cadre corps that reached, for the first time in China’s long history, down into rural villages. The strug­gle over development, or “national reconstruction,” among the collective leadership was intricate and ­will not concern us ­here except for two issues. First, the origins of the Cultural Revolution lay in high-­level strug­gles over po­liti­cal direction and thus economic planning. Second, a triumphalism underlies the po­liti­cal theater analyzed ­here ­because so many citizens supported the government’s achievements, including the end of a ­century of war. In the two high-­tide years between 1966 (the po­ liti­cal declaration of Cultural Revolution) and 1968 (when the Maoists disarmed the student movement and “sent down” urban, educated youth to learn from the revolutionary peasants), the Red Guard seized on and retooled the revolutionary po­liti­cal arsenal. The strug­gle per­for­mance scripts, the trial presessions to rehearse charges against the accused, the choreographing of stage settings, the belittling costumes that “strug­gle objects” ­were forced to wear, and the stoking of mass emotions to the breaking point all had revolutionary pre­ce­dents reaching back into the 1920s and 1930s. ­These cultural policies proved so effective that they 192 

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still characterize global Maoist revolutionary theory and praxis. The Red Guard called on this heritage to instigate their revolutionary action.5 Although Wang’s purge reverberated with strug­gles begun in the late nineteenth ­century they are anything but over. Just in the past de­cade, Marxist feminists have sought to evaluate what ­trials like this one squandered. Nicola Spakowski has regularly evaluated the new Chinese Socialist Feminist movement of Dong Limin, Song Shaopeng, Yan Hairong, Pun Ngai, Zhong Xueping, Bai Di, Lü Xinyu, He Guimei, Wang Lingzhen, Zuo Jiping, and many other scholars and researchers in the ­People’s Republic of China and abroad.6 Post-­Thermidorian scholars form a loose movement seeking to reconsider the socialist heritage, including the painful stakes that remain at the center of feminist politics, as Wang’s case shows. An event is a po­liti­cally inspired action undertaken to install a discovered truth. Yes, but historically events are long, long strug­gles to resolve how truth w ­ ill be worked out and how po­liti­cal actors ­will voluntaristically resolve truth’s social, economic, and emotional implications.

Misperforming the Truth of ­Woman The Jinggangshan Regiment consisted of mobilized college students acting ­under the direction of Chairman Mao Zedong, and, in this case, Mao’s life partner and wife, Comrade Jiang Qing (1914–1991). Kuai Dafu (b. 1945), a twenty-­one-­year-­old chemical engineering major at Qinghua University, headed up the regiment and dramatically expounded on the revolutionary pro­cesses for subjecting class enemies to mass criticism. The pedagogical readying sessions against Wang Guangmei and Wang’s final, compulsory public per­for­mance showed bodily poses, visual clichés, rhetorical language, ideas, motivations, and options for attacking “objects” (a criminal who misrepresented ­women and personified the cap­i­tal­ist road, in the rhe­toric of the time) and “struggling” them (and their bourgeois feudal society) to death. For the 1967 public trial, Kuai and his regiment outfitted Wang, their “strug­gle object,” with a necklace of gilded Ping-­Pong balls and a “Muslim” head covering seen in figure 6.1. In other graphesis, she appears in a 1930s-­style straw garden-­party hat and a tailor-­made qipao (the national dress of modern Chinese w ­ omen from the 1920s to the late 1960s), accessorized with a l­ ittle purse or an umbrella and a string of pearls. The grossly Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  1 9 3

6.1  ​Wang Guangmei and

Ping-­Pong ball necklace. From Yang Kelin, Wenhua dageming bowuguan. 1967

large necklace of Ping-­Pong balls during the trial denoted the pearls Wang had allegedly worn, against direct o­ rders, during a diplomatic mission to Indonesia. The qipao, also called the China dress, or cheongsam, became the central signifier in the revolutionary actions taken against Wang. This was not the first time Wang had been indicted, but it was the most elaborately staged and was a direct consequence of Wang’s role in criminalizing the actions of Kuai, the key Qinghua rebel student leader. On June 9, 1966, Wang, an elite-­level cadre in the Communist Party’s Central Committee General Office, together with five hundred members of a work team sent by the Politburo Standing Committee, had arrived at Qinghua University, China’s second most impor­tant university ­after Peking (or Beijing) University, to resolve a student uprising. The ad hoc work team was also a venerable po­liti­cal tool of Chinese Communist Party governance. The only singular ­thing about this one was the work team’s composition: its ranks consisted overwhelmingly of high-­level party members. Nonetheless, high-­ranking federal officials intervening in a revolt of undergraduate students was not surprising given the key role universities played in party governance. The work team suppressed the “radicals,” students who would burgeon into the Red Guard movement, 194 

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and Wang, the work team leader, reported back to Liu Shaoqi, then China’s president and her husband, that the episode was over. In late June, Kuai would publicly attack Wang, calling her work team’s intervention a “White Terror.” He intended the term to invoke General Chiang Kai-­shek’s order in 1927 to massacre an estimated 300,000 Chinese leftists, Communist operatives, sympathizers, and suspected sympathizers. Kuai posted his accusatory dazibao—or “­great character poster,” the signature graph of the Chinese G ­ reat Proletarian Cultural Revolution—­ exposing Wang’s so-­called backstage or “black hand” activities. The result? Kuai was locked down in his dormitory and “hatted” with the dunce cap, meaning that he and his supporters w ­ ere now u­ nder indictment as counterrevolutionaries. No picture exists of the hatting of Kuai, but had a public hatting occurred, it might have resembled the image in figure 6.2.

6.2  ​Photo­graph of a class ­enemy being hatted. Taken by Li Zhensheng. Harbin, August 25, 1966.

Courtesy of Contact Press Images.

Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  1 9 5

In mid-­July 1966, Mao Zedong returned to Beijing and pulled the high-­level work team out of Qinghua University. At that point, Wang had to deliver a pro forma self-­criticism to acknowledge her po­liti­cal error and that she had overdisciplined the student; in ritual penance, she did a bit of symbolic ­labor, cooking in the student dorm kitchen, and left the campus. Over the next year, as the Maoist Red Guard po­ liti­cal movement spread, satiric renditions of Wang’s actions appeared in cartoon format and commentaries in Red Guard media proliferated, including the prominent broadsheet Jinggangshan News Kuai’s group put out. ­These commentaries specialized in mocking Wang, as in figure 6.3, where Mao’s avatar, the monkey king Sun Wukong, dispatches evildoers, and figure 6.4, where Wang is an evil grabbing hand.7 Yet Wang had ­every reason to assume her actions ­were legitimate. Chinese Communist circles had targeted ­women’s emancipation since 1927, and elite politics and po­liti­cal policies encouraged all ­women with po­liti­cal standing to express their natu­ral rights. Pre­ce­dent suggested that she had acted normatively, an expectation to which all ranked party members laid claim in a hierarchical order. Unexpectedly, however, while it became increasingly clear, that the major conflict pitted Chairman Mao

6.3  ​Cartoon of Wang Guangmei being defeated by Sun Wukong (Mao Zedong). Jinggangshan

News, reproduced in Zhou Yuan, Xinbian Hongweibing zilaio, 1.

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6.4  ​“The Grabbing Hand.” Jinggangshan

News, January 1, 1967.

6.5  ​Red Guard w ­ omen dance. Red Guard stock image, api/Gamma-­Rapho via Getty Images.

against President Liu, the mounting criminalization of Wang raised an impor­tant and long-­standing riddle that theorists had confronted: how is sexual difference physiological yet at the same time social? The immediate prob­lem Wang confronted, the strategy that Kuai and Jiang Qing developed, put her feminine per­for­mance on trial; it raised questions about the appropriate per­for­mance of Chinese womanhood on a global stage. In the end, Wang stood accused b­ ecause she had incorrectly performed the truth of ­women. In the end it turned out that correct per­for­mance for high-­ranking female comrades notwithstanding, girls would also be transformed into joyful, smiling, air-­gun-­armed fighting performers, as figure 6.5 shows.

Rethinking the Truth of ­Women Jinggangshan Regiment’s newspaper richly documented Kuai’s campaign to hold Wang to account.8 Of course, the primary target of all the Red Guard publications was Wang’s husband, Liu Shaoqi.9 However, Jinggangshan News ran even more broadside satiric poems, cartoon histories of Wang’s work-­team activity (claiming she used her stepdaughter Liu Tao to manipulate meetings, purge radical students, peddle potatoes at the student dorm kitchen, and so on), and general polemics against 198 

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Wang than other Red Guard publications did, perhaps owing to Kuai-­ Wang and Jiang Qing–­Wang relations over personalized quality. Selling the cartoon histories as e­ arlier graphesis sold Cutex hand-­care products or New York brand cigarettes in the 1920s, repetition established the key accusations that Kuai’s team martialed to interrogate Wang. Po­liti­cal cartoons w ­ ere adapting story arc advertising widely current when Jiang Qing, a cinema actress, joined the left-­wing cultural world and migrated to the Border Regions during the Anti-­Japanese War, where she met and married Mao. Like advertising cells in the first half of the twentieth ­century, Cultural Revolution cartoons can be understood graphically, although in this case accessibility to illiterates was a mere conceit, since the images, published in Red Guard papers, circulated primarily through radical student media. “The Grabbing Hand” (see figure 6.4), efficiently lays out the sequence of Wang’s crimes in what became a monotonously familiar Cultural Revolution meme. But the advertising ele­ment is only one part of the leftist po­liti­cal culture’s heritage. The campaign strategy included so-­called research, which largely consisted of written accusations, transcriptions, satiric visual attacks on Wang’s revisionism, and photo­graphs of her in demeaning poses, all of it feels bizarre in hindsight but held truths about ­women in the moment.

Global Cold War and China’s ­Women’s Liberation The events took place at three levels. The first level involves actors in a po­liti­cal strug­gle for power: Kuai Dafu, the Qinghua chemical engineering major; Zhou Enlai, China’s premier and arguably the second-­ most-­p owerful Communist Party figure in the country during the Maoist period; Liu Shaoqi, the main target in the Cultural Revolution, accused of “taking the cap­i­tal­ist road” and being “China’s Khrushchev”; Liu Tao, Liu Shaoqi’s ­daughter; Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife; Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during the Cold War, who was responsible for “de-­Stalinization”; Sukarno (1901–1970), Indonesia’s first president, an office he held from 1945 to 1967; and one of Sukarno’s wives, Hardini. In 1956 Khrushchev had publicized the extent and vio­lence of Stalin’s policies, which in the minds of many called the Communist heritage into question. This heightened tensions between the P ­ eople’s Republic of China and the Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  1 9 9

USSR over ideological hegemony. Eventually, the ccp accused Khrushchev of heterodox thinking, thereby initiating the first Sino-­Soviet split. Indeed, the term Khrushchev became an imprecation against any ccp member who “took the cap­i­tal­ist road” during the Cultural Revolution. Second, demonizing Khrushchev and Liu Shaoqi gave Kuai and Jiang Qing a po­liti­cal ground to attack Wang for her allegedly inappropriate attire and po­liti­cal disloyalty not simply to the nation but, since the Cultural Revolution was perceived in China to be a global strug­gle to the death over truth, disloyalty to the global event of ­women, the truth of ­women’s personhood, ­women’s po­liti­cal standing in the Communist movement, and history itself.10 When Khrushchev de­cided to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba in 1962 during the standoff between the USSR and the United States, the Chinese again accused him of betraying Communism, and the two countries severed diplomatic relations. Consequently, as the Chinese-­government-­sponsored, global, sporadically violent Maoist Cultural Revolution began to unfold, acts that in retrospect appear trivial or absurd seemed reasonable, even necessary, to defend truth. Po­liti­cally, this parallax truth implicated a U.S.-­supported massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party—­killing an estimated one million—in the strug­gle over Wang’s dress. At a third level, conflicts arose over ideas. Wang and Jiang took polar-­opposite points of view on what female liberation looked like in a revolutionary f­ uture. Jiang’s supporters criticized Wang’s presumptuousness and her belief that she embodied the iconic liberated Communist ­woman subject. They committed to media graphesis their visionary biofemale model: a strong, sometimes violent, hefty young worker or peasant looking to Jiang Qing for a proletarian self-­sacrificing, maternal figurehead. The event of ­women resurged integrally in Red Guard research and their “evidence” of Wang Guangmei’s duplicity: while declaring herself a Communist, she had held fast to the commodity form, betraying the truth of ­women. Wang seems never to have foreseen that working-­class or rural village w ­ omen revolutionary heroes (or w ­ omen modeling themselves a­ fter them) might one day trump her own revolutionary credentials or supersede her demonstrated level of commitment, becoming themselves the barometers of redness. An accomplished, sophisticated, highly educated party official up u­ ntil the Cultural Revolution, Wang had ­little reason to second-­guess her own stature or historical value. On January 6, 1967, Zhou Enlai permitted Kuai to capture Wang using Liu Shaoqi’s ­daughter, Liu Tao, as bait. Kuai failed to make charges 200 

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against Wang stick due to lack of evidence and insufficient preparation.11 Over the subsequent months, radical student researchers all over the country gathered dossiers on Wang and Liu Shaoqi. In April 1967, four months ­after the initial January capture, the Central Committee recaptured and remanded Wang back to the Qinghua students. Eventually, a formal strug­gle session would be performed before the vast crowd that Kuai and his group assembled to make certain that this time their charge that Wang was a counterrevolutionary would prevail. In three presessions, the Kuai forces prepared their witness for interrogation. In the verbatim transcript of ­these pretrial sessions, which are reminiscent of ­lawyers prepping a hostile witness, Wang confronted outraged students whose raw passions are moving and absurd b­ ecause the question of inappropriate feminine per­for­mance in a diplomatic setting is central and inflammatory. The materials allegedly documented a series of courtesy calls that Liu and Wang had made in Indonesia in 1963 and 1966 and judged the content of the relationship between “China’s Khrushchev” (Liu) and Indonesia’s nationalist hero, Sukarno, who had in their view suddenly turned anti-­Communist. The presession transcript and other evidence in the anti-­Wang dossier suggest that the students sought to use the emerging Cultural Revolution line against the “privileged bureaucratic cap­i­tal­ist class” and particularly the Maoist critique of the USSR’s “social imperialism,” which, they believed, Wang injected into China’s inter-­A sian diplomacy.12 This allegation connected China’s Indonesia policy and the ­battle over the subject of ­women. The students prevailed. In early 1967 Wang gave her self-­criticisms and was jailed.13 Wang went to prison for the following crimes: the Liu f­ amily had managed to ideologically poison Qinghua University; Wang, wearing her iconic qipao, had aristocratically hectored the masses; Wang had played the backstage boss to condemn Kuai; Wang had hatted legitimate Red Guard students, including Kuai, putting them at risk of being executed; Wang had done perfunctory ser­vice and apologized, but it was a cynical per­for­ mance; and so Wang’s black hand had manipulated the situation u­ ntil, in cell 10 of figure 6.4 (with the pen mightier than the sword and used for cartoon graphesis), the mighty, gender-­balanced forces of the Jinggangshan Regiment knocked out Liu and Wang with flexed, muscular fists! Another ritual visual castigation is a graph where Liu is painting a picture of his wife in the false guise of a revolutionary, while he stares (and we follow his cartoon gaze) at the ­actual cartoon Wang, who is wearing the bourgeois qipao (figure 6.6) captured in a con­temporary photo­graph Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 0 1

in figure 6.7. The feudal fan in Wang’s hand reads, “In form it is left, but in fact it is right,” and in a speech ­bubble, Liu is congratulating himself on his art’s capacity to alter real­ity. Liu’s fake painting has Wang dressed in the military clothing of Jiang Qing. This supercharged environment and visual iconization of po­liti­cal stances—­namely, the lovely, maternal Jiang Qing figure and her painted image reflecting her revolutionary devotion—­reads as clearly as the points of Wang’s prominent stiletto heels and her sexualized ankles (or the bourgeois modern-­girl consumers of imported Cutex hand-­care products in 1930).14 In its first year, the Cultural Revolution was carnivalesque, b­ ecause the known po­liti­cal world had suddenly turned upside down to reveal that royalty like Liu and Wang ­were in fact fakes. Student activists believed that the pedagogical mass arts of plays, cartoons, graphic books, movies, and model operas fulfilled the mandate Mao Zedong had set out—­ namely, a cultural revolution to reset the consciousness of, as Mao had put it, the poor and blank Chinese. Like so many other graphs, images, and texts, the cartoons ­were intended to educate the masses and reveal po­liti­cal realities. Although Red Guard publications provide impor­tant

6.6  ​Anti–­Wang Guangmei

cartoon, “In form it is left, but in fact it is right,” 1967. Red Guard Publication, 1967.

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6.7  ​Wang Guangmaei wearing the qipao and sitting between Hardini and Liu Shaoqi. Jinggang-

shan News, 1967.

details and information about the case against Wang, most historically provocative is the verbatim transcript of the Jinggangshan Regiment’s interrogation of Wang at 6:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on April 9, 1967, just before her appearance at the mass rally, and again at 5:30 p.m., ­after the session had ended. A small group calling itself the “ ‘South Sea ­Great Wall’ Fighting Detachment of the Jinggangshan Regiment of Qinghua University” (apparently a co­ali­tion that Kuai formed in a series of Red Guard group congresses) claimed responsibility for circulating the transcript, urging that this trial be used as a negative case to educate the masses.15 Wang emerges vividly in the transcript, a wily and intelligent antagonist and an aristocratic ­woman with a strong sense of personal entitlement. Her retrospectively celebrated vulnerability to the student interrogation is clear, but so is her commitment to Liu Shaoqi’s positions, which Kuai, the leading student Maoist, was framing and attacking as revisionism. Her debate strategy seems clear. She confesses m ­ istakes to protect her overall domestic po­liti­cal rec­ord, the standard ruse of “veteran revolutionaries confronting a new situation” (lao geming yudao xinwenti), who Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 0 3

may misunderstand the immediate strug­gle but are still educable.16 In the after­noon presession, for instance, she refused to admit that she had behaved autocratically in relation to the masses during her ­earlier ser­vice on a work team in Taoyuan during the Socialist Education Movement. But she abjectly confessed that she had made significant errors during the Qinghua work team’s pro­cess when she quashed student revolutionaries and targeted them as rightists. Though willing to concede that Liu had misunderstood the objectives of the Cultural Revolution, she refused the students’ charges that Liu had taken the cap­i­tal­ist road or had reversed the verdict on Stalin and was thus “China’s Khrushchev” (that is, a “veteran rightist”), as Liu was known in the Red Guard media and ­later the national Communist Party organs. Wang refused to indict Liu but volubly agreed that Liu should be overthrown. That way, the revolution could proceed in the direction that Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution Group (aka the Gang of Four: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen) had marked out. In this regard, Wang echoed Liu’s offer to Mao that Liu be allowed to retire into the peasantry. In Wang’s final, poststruggle eve­ning session, it is hard not to hear a mixture of pride and resignation as she once again recounts her f­ amily’s elevated class background and debates the fine points about her girlhood, her pathbreaking academic achievements, her work as an under­ground Communist operative and high-­level ccp translator from En­glish and French, her companionate marriage to the much-­married Liu, and her official life as the first lady of the country.17 In the first presession, the student interrogator also compelled Wang to put on a dress that had been provided for her. Wang refused many times. In general histories of the incident, the question of Wang’s dress is generally the only entry found ­under her name in the index. The transcript shows that the students ­were intransigent: Wang was to wear exactly the same dress she had worn during her visit with Liu to Indonesia in 1963. Wang declined again and again, saying that it was cold out and offering to wear something e­ lse, a garment that was “a gift from Af­ghan­ i­stan,” which the Afghanis had given her ­because they knew she was “fashion minded.” In fact, she offered to wear a spring dress, a fur coat, anything, it would appear, except the dress the Jinggangshan militants had presented for her. The interrogator repeats, “We want you to put on the dress that you wore in Indonesia.”18 According to the transcript, a­ fter she had been physically forced into the too-­small silk dress, sheer silk

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stockings, and pointed, heeled shoes, Wang was photographed and then removed to the mass strug­gle site. Reading and understanding strug­gle session transcripts is not easy. The interrogators and Wang herself express themselves elliptically in the patois of the time. ­Because so much rides on extracting details and forcing or resisting certain interpretations of what ­these tiny ­factors ­will mean, the larger context of the strug­gle recedes. In publications like the Red Congress Propaganda Group’s May 1967 volume, Liushi fufu milan de sheng­huo chou’e de linghun (The Lius’ de­cadent life and despicable souls) and the Jinggangshan Regiment’s Sikai Wangguangmei de huapi (Rip off Wang Guangmei’s evil disguise), the case against Wang is clear-­cut.19 Liu had defamed what, in deference to Marxism and Leninism, modestly came to be called “Mao Zedong Thought,” and Wang had “lost face” for the Chinese revolutionary nation by coddling class enemies and international rightists like Sukarno, shown in figure 6.8 resting his arm on a bloody club. The evidence suggests that, from the point of view of the Red Guard faction, the Indonesian case was only one diplomatic incident in Liu’s sleeper-­cell revisionism. An alleged journalist, Zhu Lie shows in De­ cadent Life that, for instance, at a 1958 meeting between Liu Shaoqi and “a party representative from an Eastern Eu­ro­pean country,” Liu resolutely took the Khrushchevian revisionist standpoint. This alleged fact suggested that Liu’s revisionist pragmatism had poisoned the entire Chinese diplomatic cause and compromised world revolution ever since the founding of the ­People’s Republic of China. The lead chapter of De­ cadent Life, “Look! China’s Khrushchev—­Liu Shaoqi’s Despicable Ugly Face” (Kan! Zhongguo de helu xiaofu Liu Shaoqi de beibi choulou miankong), addresses this question of China’s external, antirevisionist foreign policy.20 The chapter accuses Liu of undermining Mao’s entire antirevisionist foreign policy when he questioned the ccp’s enduring commitment to Stalinist policies. The immediate charge was that Liu had somehow played a role in the October 1, 1965, murder of six Indonesian army generals, which triggered a six-­month-­long liquidation purge of the Indonesian Communist Party, its leader Aidit, alleged followers and village-­and factory-­level cadres.21 Thus, dress or no dress, Kuai’s po­liti­cal stance rested on understanding Liu and Wang’s diplomatic work. This was not simply a ­matter of opportunism or callow adolescent savagery. The book’s editorial

Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 0 5

6.8  ​Satire of Wang

Guangmei wearing the qipao alongside Liu Shaoqi and Sukarno as he holds a bloody club. Jinggangshan News, March 8, 1967.

committee accuses Sukarno of being a “bourgeois po­liti­cal hack [and] anti-­Communist, anti-­Chinese old hand.” They cite as their source an unnamed journalist who traveled with the Liu party in 1963 and 1966 during its tours of Southeast Asia and substantiated the authors’ charge that the Indonesia trips ­were, in fact, “Khrushchevian junkets”: Chairman Mao has taught us that it is impossible to fundamentally change imperialists and reactionaries. . . . ​Chairman Mao also taught us that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But Liu Shaoqi on the contrary takes Chairman Mao’s directives and runs in the opposite direction, singing a countermelody while strongly flattering Sukarno’s nasakom, saying: “We are so happy to see President Sukarno’s initiative, to use nasakom to create and strengthen a new Indonesian ­peoples’ collectivity. . . .” Using ­these completely Khrushchevian reactionary ideologies of “taking the parliamentary road” [yihui daolu], “peaceful coexistence” [heping gongchu], and “peaceful transition” [heping 206 

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guodu] [Liu Shaoqi] deracinated the revolutionary vigilance of the Indonesian ­people. [­These wrong policies continued] right down to September 1965, when the reactionary Indonesians overthrew the po­liti­cal authority and bathed the nation of a thousand islands in blood. Untold numbers of party members and revolutionary masses ­were cruelly exterminated, which caused the Indonesian national demo­cratic ­people’s revolution to sustain ­great damage.22

Liu not only swore friendship in diplomatic terms with Sukarno, dubbing him an anticolonial hero, the report continued, but also promoted a reactionary and U.S. imperialist “third road” policy, and in 1965 it was the Liu-­Khrushchev-­Sukarno policy that had failed.23 That students launched this accusation suggests they had compiled their dossier to bolster the strategy and avoid embarrassing themselves a second time, insuring that the second interrogation and mass strug­ gle concluded well. Wang would be directly confronted and judged for her role in the allegedly problematic diplomacy and for taking the wrong position in a two-­line strug­gle. In fact, Wang did answer the accusation directly. “At the time [in 1963],” she sharply rebuked the students, “Soekarno was quite progressive . . . ​in diplomacy.”24 Given Soekarno’s documented friendliness to the ccp, she was right. But that was not the issue. Wang’s interrogators linked the question of a revisionist line in inter-­Asian diplomacy to the charge that Liu had engaged in “wife diplomacy.” During the 1963 trip, they alleged, Liu had her use her charms to flirt with reactionaries. Not only had she ignored the masses of Indonesians (a standard accusation), but also her be­hav­ior had lost face for China by disclosing the casual common-­law ele­ment of her marriage to Liu, a prob­lem compounded by the fact that on her trip she took personnel and implements in order to boost her star power. Th ­ ese included a personal hairdresser and a qipao that she had had made in Hong Kong—­ the very qipao that the Jinggangshan Regiment insisted Wang put on before she was taken to the strug­gle session. So not only did Wang behave like a feudal empress in the course of her duties, but through the lens of allegations about her marital impropriety, she had also allowed Sukarno to use her like a sexual toy. (And Liu had worn a Khrushchev-­style hat!) In the 2006 publication Wang Guangmei fangtanlu (Interviews with Wang Guangmei), interviewer-­editor Huang Zheng devoted a full chapter to Wang’s recollections of the 1963 visit.25 Wang took the opportunity to refute each of the points that the Jinggangshan interrogators had used Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 0 7

against her forty years ­earlier. Sukarno visited Beijing regularly in the early 1960s, she explains, so that is why she and Liu knew him, and her relations with him w ­ ere relatively warm. When they arrived at the Jakarta airport, Mrs. Sukarno was not ­there ­because Sukarno had many wives, as is customary in Islam (and Indonesia is an Islamic country), and none of them accompanied him on state greeting occasions. In other words, Liu did not use Wang’s beauty to attract Sukarno, but rather Indonesian habits differed from Chinese official expectations, and so Sukarno’s ­daughter had acted as the official host in place of her m ­ other. However, Wang continued, l­ater in the visit she did indeed travel with one of Sukarno’s wives, Hardini, who before her marriage to Sukarno had been the wife of a power­ful regional official. Indeed, Hardini had visited China in 1962, when Mao and Jiang Qing met her at official functions. Analyzing a po­liti­cal sequence that unfolded during a global world war helps to distinguish the national from the w ­ omen as such. In this po­liti­cal sequence, two female Chinese politicians are fighting to the death over what a liberated female per­for­mance ­will be. The circumstances are a dispute over the state per­for­mance of femininity at the highest diplomatic levels during an anti-­Communist purge, a single Cold War conflict. Wang stated for the rec­ord that she knew very well that Sukarno was a skilled politician who used his relationship to China and the United States to his advantage whenever pos­si­ble. This is what diplomatic relations are all about. Wang herself had informally gathered information for Liu on the Cold War balance of power from a French reporter, b­ ecause Charles de Gaulle’s government remained relatively in­de­pen­dent from the United States and had its own unilateral Franco-­Chinese relationship. That was the substance of her routine diplomatic work in Jakarta in 1963. The Lius visited Ba­li and returned home. And she stated again for the rec­ord that neither she nor Liu could have pursued a revisionist diplomatic line, ­because they ­were simply forwarding established Central Committee objectives: “In that period, Sukarno was from our perspective more progressive. He had studied Sun Yat-sen, worked with the Communist Party, and employed a slogan called nasakom, which meant that all the po­liti­cal forces, including the Indonesian Communist Party, w ­ ere all together. What this meant is that at the airport the welcoming leaders included Aidit, the secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party. But ­because on this occasion [Liu] Shaoqi was traveling with the status of chairman of the nation, we did not see much of Aidit.”26 In other words, it was not for lack of interest, or lack of prior relations with 208 

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Aidit, but for reasons of state protocol that she and Liu did not spend their time with Communist revolutionary movement leaders.27 Each point emerging out of this claustrophobic, intensely motivated strug­gle between Kuai and Wang places the truth of ­women at stake. The Qinghua strug­gle was consequently not just domestic politics, nor simply a personal dispute between the wives of Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi. Wang’s trial involved high-­stakes geopolitics played out among scientifically demonstrable, bioge­ne­tic, physiologically living w ­ omen who both demanded a po­liti­cal end to their social oppression, including the defendant herself, who insisted on exercising her natu­ral rights to shape communitarian and normative be­hav­iors. In fact, ­there is no way to extricate the event of ­women from geopolitics, h­ ere the 1950 Chinese participation in the Korean War and the 1960 Sino-­Soviet split. The more ­these ­great po­liti­cal earthquakes are studied, the clearer it is that po­liti­cal events and population-­mobilization campaigns throughout the Cold War drove policy on ­women and ­family formation, w ­ hether in an emancipatory social revolution as in China or Cuba or in what some call the most constricted and hyperdomesticized world ever in the United States immediately ­after the world war and throughout the Cold War. Widening the circumstances where the event of ­women is undertaken from the nation to international politics clarifies how historically vis­i­ble ­women’s liberation strug­gles become. But it also shows why, once the humanity of ­women is accepted, the way out of injustice and the way into parity cannot be simply national citizenship, suffrage, or property rights. Obversely, contest over truth in the event of ­women is a modern politics. Wang’s appearance on the world stage as China’s first lady was a po­liti­cal act. She and Jiang Qing w ­ ere in the room, so to speak, from 1963 to 1965, when Liu and Wang made regular diplomatic visits to Jakarta.28 As unequal as t­ hese marriages ­were, high-­ ranking w ­ omen participated in a Chinese-­Indonesian relationship that would accelerate U.S. involvement in bloody massacres to overthrow Sukarno’s co­ali­tion government.29

Fidelity in the Event of ­Women Why is this microbial, intensely ideologized conflict over the modern ­woman so impor­tant in an intricate, ever-­proliferating geopo­liti­cal story about global Communism in the Cold War era? The Wang Guangmei Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 0 9

affair was part of the larger event of ­women that suffused and ­shaped modernity as such. An event is pos­si­ble when p­ eople apprehend a new truth and invoke that truth in an effort to transform their po­liti­cal lives. H ­ ere, immanent, lost in the material gestalt of dresses, shoes, and pearl necklaces, yet unequivocally pre­sent in assertions made by Kuai Dafu, Wang Guangmei, Jiang Qing, and many ­others, is the revolutionary claim that ­women not only have a scientifically demonstrable, bioge­ne­tic body emerging over evolutionary time but also demand revolutionary legitimation. Every­one involved in the small-­scale strug­gle agreed that w ­ omen ­were categorically “victims of oppression” who “declare” themselves oppressed and are “part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed.”30 The world of the Red Guard rebellions qualifies as an autonomous politics of the oppressed; it arose in the heat of ­battle over how the po­liti­cal superstructure of the country would be constructed. When the subject of ­women is at stake, the b­ attle over w ­ omen’s truths cannot but take a po­liti­cal form. Femininity itself takes on a revolutionary stylishness. Wang, Jiang Qing, and their adherents strug­gled to define what a ­woman is and in so ­doing displayed an agonistic distress about the truth of womanhood, a feminine per­for­mance determined to be appropriate given w ­ omen’s innate rights, physiological responsibilities to the society, and personal volition to break out of narcissistic attachment to pearls, hats, dresses, brooches, and shoes. ­Women achieved historical po­liti­cal visibility at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, and ­earlier chapters of this book have shown how this discernibility accreted, petrified in evidence spewed from corporate imperialism and canonized in vernacular sociology, compacted into the social amber of commercial ephemera and advertising images, visual graphs, to nonetheless insist on the truth of ­women. Living the truth of ­women in social existence proved difficult, however. Increasingly, po­liti­cally progressive w ­ omen and men saw proof of the truth about sperm, ovaries, ova, and hormones in procreation and knit this into a platform where they voluntaristically acted in fidelity to the event of ­women.31 If modern womanhood is an event rather than a new repre­sen­ta­tion of an always already known anatomical body, then ­people ­were acting out a new historical real­ity. They w ­ ere affirming that w ­ omen are half of humanity b­ ecause humanity is actually composed of evolutionary mammals: volition sweeps us beyond questions of the real and its repre­sen­ ta­tions. The real itself changed, and so did the po­liti­cal strug­gle that 210 

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sought to establish ­actual rights-­bearing subjects correctly performing the truth of ­women. Scrutinizing this small-­scale strug­gle over a dress and a necklace drags a socialist-­era conflict back into focus.32 Also, sometimes it is forgotten that the Cultural Revolution assumed a radical and hostile distance from the Chinese state. The geopo­liti­cal drama Wang and Jiang Qing played out was an extreme form of egalitarianism. Overthrowing Wang Guangmei, criminalizing her female per­for­mance, supplanting what the Jiang Qing Red Guard charged was commodified femininity has had implications for Communist feminisms and their distinctive vision of the ­human truth. What felt demure and natu­ral to Wang Guangmei was revealed in this strug­gle to be a dangerous portal back into the commodity fetishization of ­women. The intellectual vitality of that long-­gone world, in which a dress could have such overwhelming po­liti­cal consequences, needs to be acknowledged. Feminism throughout the Communist bloc of Bulgaria, China, ­Korea, Romania, and the Soviet Union displayed a remarkable commitment to education and ­women’s liberation that significantly impacted social reproduction. One strategy for acknowledging Communist politics of ­women is to follow Jiang Qing’s preoccupation with w ­ omen and feminine per­for­mance. From her adolescence to her ultimate arrest and suicide, she remained committed to dramatically acting out female characters. According to her Collected Work [ Jiang Qing wen lu] she began writing about Henrik Ibsen’s Nora character from A Doll’s House in 1934, when she played for the first time the role she would ­later reprise.33 In a short published comment, “The Soliloquy of the Performer,” Jiang Qing celebrated Ibsen’s assertion that a liberated w ­ oman should “be a true person” but also noted how difficult it was for young ­women in her situation in early 1930s China to live this creed. Though no option open to Jiang at the time seemed palatable, she states, becoming an actress was her choice.34 Throughout the late 1930s, Jiang Qing’s publications returned repeatedly to how she resolved her artistic and personal contradictions, performing alternative versions of womanhood onstage. So although the real historical conditions l­ imited new w ­ omen’s ability to achieve economic and social in­de­pen­dence, Jiang Qing’s spirit of innovation and revolution compelled her to try to forge a Communist po­liti­cal strategy that acted out new possibilities while she remained immured to semifeudal, semicolonial conditions. Although the advertising ephemera analyzed in chapter 4 offered no Communist or anarchist pathway, they normalized ­women’s physicality. We see in Cultural Revolutionary graphesis that Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 1 1

draws on advertising stories and cartoon methods muscular, vital bodies that repurposed the older forms to establish astonishing new points. Within the entire Communist bloc, intellectual, social, ideological, policy, and economic transnational flows w ­ ere rich and constant. Jiang Qing, for instance, knew a ­great deal about Rus­sian experimental theater; North Korean artists used Maxim Gorki’s The ­Mother (1906), and their own work found millions of fans in the ­People’s Republic of China. The strug­gle among leftist artists over how the ­actual truth of ­women should be enacted theatrically was a staple in leftist art circles through the late 1920s and the 1930s. In literary terms, writers dealt with the theme of “love and revolution,” showing female revolutionaries’ strug­gle to balance sexual expression against social discipline, commodified femininity against the graceless physiological chastity that, it was claimed, the revolution demanded. Literary found­ers Ding Ling, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun celebrated the tension between the modern girl and the revolutionary w ­ oman in their pathbreaking work. In film culture, Ruan Lingyu made this tension iconic. In New ­Women (Xin nüxing) (1935), her despairing petit bourgeois heroine dies with a s­ ilent scream “I want to live! I want to live!” pouring out her desperation as she dies, torn between the revolution of her flesh and the po­liti­cal challenge that in­de­pen­dent life imposed on f­ ree ­women. Scholars in the United States and the P ­ eople’s Republic of China have put critical energy into interpreting and analyzing the emotional and po­liti­cal double binds that in­de­pen­dent ­women experienced. But in this study the stakes are philosophical. And that is where “Jiang Qing’s Thought” is relevant. In an early, strikingly banal story, Jiang Qing analogized the contradiction that set her physiologically material body against the lack of social supports required to live ­free, using a pathetic childhood story about a sparrow she had “rescued.” The bird’s spirit of in­de­pen­dence outstripped the care that the ­little girl gave it. In “saving” the bird, she accidently killed it by breaking its spirit. Jiang Qing’s tedious point was that liberated ­women, like wounded sparrows, must be given the opportunity to fly, even when or if their path leads ultimately to death. She embraced, even reinforced and banalized, the theory of ­women’s necessary secondary narcissism that Pan Guangdan had forwarded in his Xiaoqing case study. Moreover, her related essays posited that to know one’s true self or spirit, ­every ­woman would need to act—to literally act out herself. Jiang Qing was proposing that literally acting out one’s personhood in public dramatic art enabled her and by extension all ­women to understand their 212 

•  Chapter Six

f­ uture lives. In 1936 she had begun writing about her life as an actress in left-­w ing theater groups. She fictionalized her own pro­cess of entering the life (shenru sheng­huo) of the rural poor to soak up knowledge about their lives and prepare herself to be a dramaturge, to dramatize and crystallize their experience and vision. At the same time, she sought to puncture the rural masses’ provincialism without alienating them, developing a thoughtful pro­cess for indigenizing avant-­garde Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean theatrical experiments. Even h­ ere, however, Jiang Qing threads issues through her own needle to underscore rural ­people’s problematic sex roles. Gender trou­ble in rural areas included peasants’ belief that in the absence of long hair and bound feet, it was impossible to tell ­whether revolutionary youths ­were male or female. This local feudalism forced Communist drama troupes to balance local customs against the liberatory potential of short hair, natu­ral bodies, mass revolution, and anti-­Japanese re­sis­tance. Jiang Qing’s 1937 “Our Lives” explains her consciousness of herself in relation to world theater. She not only embraced Ibsen’s character Nora but became “a Nora,” she explained, a w ­ oman indistinguishable from the stage role and its agonistic script of liberation. In my terms, she became an autonomous self in relation to her socially ­v iolated natu­ral rights. Jiang had absorbed dramaturge Richard Boleslavsky’s technique ­after reading his 1933 book Acting: The First Six Lessons.35 She went on to play other Nora-­like roles, particularly Katarina in Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s melodrama of ­women’s oppression, The Storm.36 ­These experiences led Jiang Qing to speculate about performers’ lives, their offstage or personal lives, and to consider how the performing arts might be enabling po­liti­cal thinking, particularly the question of individual ­w ill.37 ­These are familiar literary tropes in many strains of the Chinese national traditions of feminism. A case might be made that Jiang Qing’s juvenilia is distinctive ­because she loosely connected questions of personality or temperament in w ­ omen (ren’ge), the so­cio­log­i­cal trope of the sex role (xing de juese) and stage advice born out of her own experience as both a ­woman and a performer. The importance of her 1937 article “Our Lives” is that ­women are like actors, in the sense of having to consider po­liti­cal liberation as an intellectual prob­lem at the same time as they must discipline their bodies, use reason judiciously, and, as all performers must, exercise spiritual control.38 In the early 1960s, Jiang Qing began organ­izing scripts, performers, per­for­mance groups, and stage directions to innovate what became her Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 1 3

model operas during the Cultural Revolution. Six of the eight scripts have female protagonists and plots involving a heroine’s valiant efforts to seek self-­liberation, the liberation of ­women as a collectivity, and the triumph of the revolutionary nation. Though Jiang Qing could have continued to employ expressive short stories and autobiographical essays, she turned away from lit­er­a­ture to release sets of what appear to be basically stage notes and l­ater transcripts of her “chats” when she met experimental theater troops. Her notes and commentaries focus exclusively on Peking opera (jingju). Throughout, she focuses on operatic procedures, as in her essay “On Instructions Regarding the Creation of ‘­Great Wall of the Southern Sea’ and Shooting the Film.”39 Jiang Qing did not analogize to other dramatic art forms, and her remarks remind the reader that per­for­mance enables the actor to rise beyond poor life conditions into a realm where they can spell out alternatives futuristically in a disciplined, routinized, choreographed, and schematized graphic theatricality.40

Commodity in Revolution In the concentrated brief against Wang Guangmei, Rip Off Wang Guangmei’s Evil Disguise, the Beijing Assembly of Red Guards, Beijing Engineering Institute of Chemical Fibers, opened with a charge that Wang was evil ­because she was literally a “modern w ­ oman” (modeng funü).41 The pathos of the transcripts is obscuring. Jiang Qing had indeed, the student interrogators reminded Wang, complained that in 1963, on a trip to Jakarta, Wang had worn a pearl necklace in defiance of Jiang Qing’s advice. Wang responded that in fact, Jiang Qing had forbidden her to wear a brooch, not a necklace, but that obviously it is all the same. This plot ele­ment explains why the Indonesian costume strug­gle usually gets interpreted as a catfight between two power­ful wives. No doubt it was, in part. Yet the scandal of the jewelry is only a small part of the charges the militants leveled against Wang related to her ill-­performed Indonesian trip. Once the prosecutors turned to the specific charges against Wang, the case documented her lack of seriousness or Communist Party “attitude” (qiwei).42 Specifically, the haute bourgeoisie, the “modern ­woman,” had drawn on all her social capital and physical advantages to such a degree that she had misperformed the truth of ­women. In Maoist revolutionary strug­gle, adherents must seek the truth, and Wang’s characterization of woman214 

•  Chapter Six

hood did a disservice or injustice to the truth. Jiang Qing, by contrast, swore fidelity to the agonistic difficulties that being or performing female entailed. She and her adherents claimed they would turn away from the qipao and its bourgeois origins, the jewelry, the entire mise-­en-­scène of the commodified femininity of Shanghai circa the 1930s appearing in the Red Guard press and of course in documentary photo­graphs starring the glamorous Wang Guangmei. The strongest evidence against Wang concerned her per­for­mance on the world stage. During the 1963 diplomatic mission, she wore a Shanghai designer dress and a hat that had been specially fabricated for her in a bourgeois marketplace in Hong Kong; in 1966 she wore a Hong Kong tailored qipao while embodying the highest-­ranking Communist Party wife in the ­People’s Republic of China. Moreover, given her bourgeois ­family training, she knew how to light Sukarno’s cigarettes and to pre­ sent herself in “modern ­woman” guise to flatter him like a serving girl. Her class background and her high position blinded her so she literally could not see why the wife of a Chinese leader of the world Communist revolution should not dress like a commercial advertisement, costuming herself like a modern ­woman.43 In other words, the most chargeable offense against her was Wang’s depoliticization of ­women; worse, Kuai and Jiang Qing took the position that each of her private actions showed her to be antipo­liti­cal. She went to Indonesia and spent no time with Comrade Aidit; she was supposed to forward the Chairman Mao line on Asian solidarity against U.S. imperialism and USSR revisionism but flirted with Sukarno instead; she took her hairdresser with her; she wore jewelry in defiance of the codes of be­hav­ior; and so on. It is hard not to imagine shock in the transcribed testimony as Wang realized that she was being criticized, not for her role in the Qinghua work team in 1965, but for her leading role in the alleged depoliticization of the subject “­women.” When Wang fi­nally staked every­thing on her gender, as in her statement to the interrogators “I am a Communist, a ­woman, and a Chinese,” she had already been strategically outmaneuvered. (This claim on the subject of ­women comes up only once in the transcript and only in this context.) By that time, revolutionary girl students seeking to politicize themselves and rethink the event of ­women already occupied the high ground.44 In the dossier that Jiang Qing had prob­ably helped create, the Red Guard Congress built a strong case against Wang over the truth of ­women. Accompanying the constant pre­sen­ta­tion of information about Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 1 5

6.9  ​Photo­graph

of Wang Guangmei wearing her white qipao and sunhat, 1966.

Wang’s clothing and accoutrements are the charges that in Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, and so on, she poisoned diplomacy with, of course, China’s Khrushchev, Liu Shaoqi. The uncomfortable point is that the students w ­ ere right. Wang’s per­for­mance style and her garb w ­ ere iconic and ­were not oriented t­ oward a po­liti­cal ­future. This book has shown in ­great detail how in advertising images of the 1920s and 1930s, so-­called modern-­girl (modeng nülang) fashion drew attention to the modernity of a physiological profile and put the internal reproductive organs out into the public media sphere (figure 6.9). The history of the qipao is well studied although no one has conclusively proved how it originated. It was e­ ither a modified version of the Manchu men’s long jacket or a synthetic design that intended to mix Eu­ ro­pean waistcoats and Chinese outerwear. With origins in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and the Manchu communities of the north, the dress ended 216 

•  Chapter Six

up hugging breasts, waist, and legs and, depending on the wearer’s taste or status, could be split up the sides to let silk stockings or pants show through. The qipao’s ambiguous origins and the fact that it became the modern “Chinese” dress rendered its significance equivocal. No ­matter where it derived or how many kinds of ­people wore it—­from schoolgirls and young married ­women, to movie stars and street­walkers, to Nationalist Party ­women worthies and brand models—­the dress could indicate femininity, out-­of-­bounds sexuality, consumer nationalism, the Chinese version of a flapper culture, and enthusiastic desire for a modern commodity life. From this perspective, Wang wore a fetish dress on her state tours as seen in figure 6.9.45 The accusations and trial against Wang put her on the defensive, particularly the graphic images flaunting her bourgeois class origin and linking her qipao and branded commodities to commercial advertising ephemera during her youth. Feminine be­hav­ior is difficult to parse. Is it biological and therefore instinctual? Is femininity provisional b­ ecause ­women’s natu­ral rights have historically been negated, so her be­hav­iors ­w ill always reflect oppression? Or, as the Maoists argued, does it arise voluntarily, a necessary po­liti­cal be­hav­ior inventing more truthful ways of living, both dif­fer­ent from men and equal to them in “the equality of men and ­women”? As the Communist movement grew and loyalists to the event of ­women in­ven­ted new rituals, ­women stepped forward to be counted as individuals, as natu­ral rights–­bearing persons, w ­ hether or not their rights w ­ ere honored in the breach.46 The po­liti­cal scenario analyzed ­here had deep roots in vari­ous domains, including the prob­lem of ­women’s po­liti­cal subjectivity. That events that are recognized ex post facto are actually rooted in new truths helps illuminate what the Kuai Dafu and the Jinggangshan Regiment’s assault against Wang means historically in the event of ­women.47 Turning back to confirm that the truth of ­women is something they can claim for themselves, ­people transfigure themselves. In philosophical language, if the truth of an event is constructed “bit by bit, from the void,” and subjects are “always in literal excess of their situation,” then “a subject is an individual transfigured by the truth she proclaims.”48 One does not qualify as a ­woman by virtue of anatomy (that would be an identitarian claim, not a truth claim) but rather in the act of seizing personhood. That is where Wang’s defense disintegrated. A po­liti­cal subject, ­woman, is evaluated by her degree of po­liti­cal awareness and egalitarian devotion. The verifiability of the event of ­women and its Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 1 7

subject has caused no end of trou­bles, and in one re­spect what we see in this Cultural Revolution scenario is not so much the politicization of ­women to the detriment of gender as a vivid charge that the Liu-­ist party state had depoliticized and commodified what by all rights of interpretation was foundationally a Maoist subject. ­There is no point in arguing the relative merits of the Red Guard position. The stylized pre­sen­ta­tions of Wang’s qipao open a central prob­lem in po­liti­cal life regarding the veracity of “­woman”: How are female po­liti­ cal subjects stabilized? During the strug­gle, posters and demonstrations attacking bourgeois revisionism ­were commonplace: [A] poster of a female student from the Department of Mechanics who posted on egalitarianism in relation to gender wrote in criticism of gender-­based work rules: “Regardless of her financial circumstances, [the female worker] gets 1.5 yuan . . . ​extra for food. . . . ​If she’s on the factory floor . . . ​if she has her period, she only has to work a maximum of four hours/day and no night shift. If she has to operate a lathe or welding equipment, she gets an extra two or three days off. She d­ oesn’t have to do any heavy ­labor at all, not even bend her back washing vegetables. This is nothing more than nurturing revisionism!49

Like all of us, the Red Guard had trou­ble articulating female difference, which they maliciously called “nurturing revisionism.” The Red Guard did not simply invert femininity or masculinize it into so-­called gender neutrality. While more research remains to be done, Hung-­Yok Ip, Tina Mai Chen, and Rosemary Roberts have all shown that in body movement and per­for­mance styles, femininity, sexuality, and expression of female difference from masculine per­for­mance never “dis­appeared” in the G ­ reat Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They ­were rerouted.50 If the depoliticization of ­women’s liberation was congruent with the statist policies that Wang Guangmei, Liu Shaoqi, and most Chinese Communists promoted, then the ­battle between Wang and Kuai Dafu must be considered epochal. Maoist feminism is being rethought ­these days, and its disavowal reconsidered. The U.S. po­liti­cal feminist thinking of the 1960s was deeply influenced by the Cultural Revolution’s emphasis on the po­liti­cal female subject through the device of speaking bitterness, or, in the 1960s U.S. argot, “consciousness raising.” Alice Echols made brilliantly clear years ago that the notion of the po­liti­cal in so-­called U.S. second-­wave feminism derived from the shock of learning about Third World strug­gles and the anti-­imperialist nationalisms of 218 

•  Chapter Six

China, Cuba, and Africa.51 Perhaps as U.S. liberation thinking realizes its self-­isolation, this abandoned proj­ect of Communist feminism w ­ ill be taken up again in the United States. But the ­great revulsion against the po­liti­cal subject of ­women has not subsided. At Wang’s death, websites filled with postings noting that she was the flower of Chinese femininity and rebuking the horrid politics of the 1960s. This was given as a major reason to celebrate her life.

Wang Guangmei’s Qipao   •  2 1 9

 Conclusion

Historians blast or grab truth out of the past in order to demonstrate how new ­things came into a previous world. The actress, socialite, and businesswoman pictured in figure C.1 had herself photographed in the likeness of s­ ilent film star Lillian Gish. The image of Miss Ing Tang (Tang Ying) approximated a modern, commodified, biological, physiological, universal new w ­ oman. She and the thousands of other players we have encountered in commercial art, cinema, po­liti­cal theory, ephemera, vernacular sociology, and countless other areas confirm ­women’s truth. Eyes upcast, Ing proffers a generic self to the public, secure in the conditions of its own possibility. Her posture and open publicity show her fidelity to an event. Commercial publications like Beiyang huabao (Beiyang pictorial, 1926–1937), where figure C.1 appeared, used beauty portraits to brand themselves. ­Every issue featured a female model on the front page just above a mélange of commodity ads, cartoons, drawings, jottings, essays, sexual gossip, and photos of social life, military life, and nudes.1 A typical page might have a nudie picture, a movie pinup, and cartoons, ads typical of the generic huabao (pictorial). Figure C.2 is typical Beiyang huabao fare. Surrounding this image are the troubling photo­graphs in figures C.3–­C.5. Th ­ ese images show executions and sexual mutilation of ­women Communists; a bystander claiming to be a photojournalist took them. My point in exposing t­ hese degrading images is to note that by this time, even torture and mutilation of ­women’s bodies had become

C.1  ​Ms. Ing Tang

dressed as Lillian Gish. Beiyang huabao, September 21, 1926.

C.2  ​A typical page of the

Beiyang pictorial, including a nudie pin-up. Beiyang huabao, May 16, 1928. C.3  ​ Beiyang huabao, Janu-

ary 18, 1928.

tabloid fodder. White Terror extermination campaign images made their way into a commercial pictorial alongside beauty queens, pinups, socialites, and educated ­mothers, all of this in technical fidelity to the event of ­women. Almost ludicrously, on the same page an ad image showcases movie star singer Gu Meijun assuring us in the commodity ad copy that morphology and sensibility line up perfectly b­ ecause w ­ omen have a female instinct (benneng) for beauty. Miss Ing Tang’s voluntarist act of self-­reproduction in the event of ­women authorized and confirmed the inchoate forces that made her photo­graph historically intelligible. As I have shown throughout this book, the conditions of thought—­the territory where a truth appeared to be declared—­included activists carry­ing out capital financialization and marketization of industrially produced commodities, commodity fetishism, petrochemicals, and significant social change. Miss Ing Tang stands in for the thousands and thousands of ­woman images that made good on corporate imperialism’s dreams of mass consumption. Beiyang huabao sprinkled media with Chinese bourgeois girl images like her, ephemera left b­ ehind to connote epistemological and so­cio­log­ic­ al transformation. The Chinese Lillian Gish is a reminder that acting on the new regime, biophysicality, is to reassert an incontestable truth, which makes physiology an integral ele­ment of colonial, cap­it­ al­ist modernity. Likewise, the modern story is always about the ­woman in the same way ephemera are part of the oceanic number of leftover old newspapers, ad posters, movie magazines, popu­lar sociologies, and poster fragments that, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, demonstrate how “the relation of what-­ has-­been to the now is dialectical . . . ​not progression but image, suddenly emergent.”2 This ripped-­out or suddenly recognized-­to-­be-­emergent dialectical image means that Miss Ing Tang and Comrade Jiang Qing ­were each in their own way loyalists to the truth of ­women and militants in the event of ­women. What about the usual cast of characters in histories of Chinese modernity? This study has aspired to loosen the grip on our histories of abstract categories like nationalism, culture, sovereignty, gender, identity, and so on. Benjamin A. Elman’s decades-­old polemic condemned mainstream writing in Chinese intellectual historiography and showed how abstractions and teleologies wrecked histories of thinking.3 He castigated its airy disregard for its own conditions and, rejecting “reductionism,” he provided a situated case study showing how to raise and resolve questions in thought and po­liti­cal situations without invoking abstract players like 222 

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C.5  ​ Beiyang huabao, JanuC.4  ​ Beiyang huabao, January 18, 1928.

ary 18, 1928.

modernization or transitional. Undoing reductionist histories of civilization is also pos­si­ble when we reconfigure the questions we ask around jumbled, compromised, conditional, irregularly ­shaped, and multiform physical evidence. Old sociology books and dictionaries, ephemeral advertising images, high modernist art, etymological crises in language revolutions, sales technologies geared at circulating commodities, propaganda, Cultural Revolution posters, and theories of consciousness and the physiological body merge to become an immanent critique addressing a historical conscious; all clarify what abstractions like nationalism or ­women may have meant in everyday life and where in the world of sensation and psychic life such abstractions resided. This is not to say that nationalism is unimportant. It is just not always the immediate stake, and evidence does not readily support or betray the agonistic issue of the national teleology. To the contrary, publications like Beiyang huabao show how ephemera make social forces and events evident even in situations where the nationalist harangue is significant. Putting aside the sad old historiographic stories about a forced marriage of male chauvinist nationalists and female feminist activists or about how liberal and anarchist theorists lost their social purchase to a vengeful, amoral Communist Party, this book notes that in fact conflicts do not revolve around polar opposites. The core point and the basic stake in this study is how to communicate the evental quality of ­women’s truth, a truth put into actions that set off social evolutionary theoretical studies and commercial culture. The event of ­women was, in conventionally Althusserian language, “overdetermined.”4 Conclusion  •  2 2 3

Loyalists to the event of ­women, its militants or “agents,” seized on the real­ity that ­human animals evolve anatomically, and at least in the Marxist camp they added that humanity also evolved ethically ­toward a better society. Social science ideology ­shaped everyday social life. That is why a broadsheet published in North China and reflecting the interests of a resistant Beiyang military po­liti­cal clique stitched together photo images of society, cartoons, a repeating Renault brand car ad, reports about Nanyang boy scouts in Tokyo, and Garage Central auto repair ads into an inviting society of plenty. Beiyang huabao is not a context. Nor can we interpret Beiyang huabao inside another, larger context, like nationalism or sovereignty. Rather, in part and as a w ­ hole, it is an endlessly iterative rendition of a revolutionary new society. Printed illustrated magazines ­were unpre­ce­dentedly modern in their content, and repetitiveness was part of their attraction. Endlessly repeating girl and ­women images in advertising cartoons and the clichéd photo­graphs of movie stars, flappers, corpses, educated w ­ omen, h­ ouse­w ives, and cosmopolitan prostitutes: the more banal ­these images become, the more universal they appear. This psychosocial world of reiterative dissolution and visual ephemera reinforces Jing Tsu’s counterintuitive argument that Chinese intellectual men’s sense of self was “based not on [loss of] sovereignty but on the embrace of failure.”5

History Buried in media mash-­ups like Beiyang huabao are two final historical points: first, that something as indisputable as physiology and sexual reproduction could ever have formed the conditions for an event; and, second, that an event of ­women rests on that fifth condition of generic truth, history, which opens as contingency u­ ntil someone seizes it. A new truth is never self-­evident, and it is never stable. Truths are contests, as the po­liti­cal strug­gle between Wang Guangmei and Jiang Qing’s proxies has shown. Battling over femininity meant seizing po­liti­cal control over the truth of the event of ­women u­ nder international eyes. Analogously, ephemeral incidents contesting what the subject “­women” would be in the twentieth ­century are too numerous to count. In 1919, famously, a bride, Zhao Wuzhen, slashed her throat with a knife and died on her way to the marital ­family’s ­house. Zhao Hailou, her ­father, had sold her to a rich f­ amily over her religious and ethical objections.6 No m ­ atter what 224 

• Conclusion

motived Zhao Wuzhen, this suicide sparked an intellectual rebellion in Changsha, where the young Mao Zedong lived. He and other intellectuals claimed it as proof that all ­women had inner, natu­ral, subjective, voluntarist drives and should be liberated to pursue their natu­ral rights and sexual imperatives to forward social and biological evolution. ­Women should be ­free to choose their mates. When they all published essays, they politicized a suicide that may have been u­ ntil that moment just another bridal suicide. ­Here again intellectuals like Li Da and Qu Qiubai, analyzed in chapter 2, claimed that like the peasantry, the proletariat, and the p­ eople, w ­ omen w ­ ere subjects defined to some degree by 7 their oppression. It has been a hundred years since Zhao’s death. Over time, phi­los­o­phers and revolutionaries like the anarchist He-­Yin Zhen, the nationalist Qiu Jin, the feminist agronomist Wu Juenong (aka Y.D.), the revolutionaries Mao Zedong, and countless ­others have vociferously claimed that ­women’s sexual difference is a site for revolutionary innovation and po­liti­cal invention.8 In a sophisticated, tumultuous philosophical world, Zhao’s suicide opened to ­women and men a singularity in the body of a categorical, physiological, philosophical female subject and helped to initiate a strug­gle over this truth. If an event and its truths can, as I hope to have shown in this study, restructure historians’ understanding of the past, then historians’ accounts also rattle the foundations of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This was Alenka Zupančič’s point when she noted the fifth generic requisite, history.9 Philosophy (Elman calls it theory) according to Badiou “seizes truths, shows them, exposes them, announces that they exist.”10 Inescapably, modern philosophy begins from “our times.”11 ­There is no way around the historicity and the so­cio­log­i­cal facts of our times, ­because it is precisely the social science notion of society and the rise of philosophy of history that demark modern times as such. Helpfully, Badiou acknowledges that con­temporary philosophy “grasps the disposition of undefined terms.”12 Undefined terms are most frequently encountered in poetic work, according to him, since that is a condition of poetics as a truth procedure. But increasingly historians and phi­los­op­ hers of history are arguing that grasping the disposition of undefined terms is central to intellectual history. The term modern girl is a neologism, as most sexually taxonomic terms are in modern twentieth-­ century Chinese. Modern-­girl studies broke the ground for studying how girl-­branded commodities w ­ ere globalized. Prescient scholars also have speculated about ­whether “real modern girls,” or girls who embodied the Conclusion  •  2 2 5

brand, actually existed. The prob­lem u­ ntil recently has been that neologisms are not all necessarily even measly epistemic events. An ambiguous and underdefined phrase, modern girl makes sense in relation to a categorical, ­women. And, it turns out, ­women is a modernist category that has been historically established in enormous, monotonous detail ­because it is a subject declared in theoretical, philosophical, anatomical, physiological, and po­liti­cal terms. This is the value of Badiou’s position to me; when con­temporary philosophical thinking encounters a term such as ­women, for instance, “it is not in the sense of a naming whose referent would need to be represented, but rather in the sense of being laid out in a series wherein the term subsists only through the ordered play of its founding connections.”13 Yet when Badiou himself treats ­women at all, he forbids the possibility of ­there being a historical female subject, ­women or a truth of ­women “­there”—in other words, “of ­there being a historical female subject, ­women, or a truth of ­women” at all. Why? ­Because “truth depends on a bar imposed on sex.”14 Badiou’s Lacanian Freud comes down decisively on the side of sexuation and against what Badiou disparages as the “gynaecologist.” Untangled, this just means that medical scrutiny of sexed bodies colludes with the scientization of the real and the drive to slice life into mechanical parts and feed them into the machine. “Should he,” Badiou argues on Freud’s behalf, “adopt the model of medical objectivity, which has always registered both body and sex? Or is it a question of the subversive subjectivation, bearing on the sexual narrative and its effects, from which nothing—­not femininity as it is ordinarily understood . . . ​ ­will come out unscathed.”15 This is a weak argument on its face. ­There is no either-or ­here. Actually, the gynecologists w ­ ere themselves revolutionaries, and the mystery of organic sexual difference has, as argued in chapter 2, never fully been resolved. Not only is t­ here nothing to be gained by demonizing the rise of the anatomical body, newly discovered in the past ­century, but the drive for sexuation is intimately connected to the gynecological order, what­ever one calls it. Th ­ ere is a difference between sexuation and sexual plea­sure and sexed subjects and surplus sexual desire, but the point at stake ­here is the po­liti­cal emergence of the split, physiologically describable, sexed ­woman in her strug­gle to assert a natu­ral right to be ­human. Badiou, himself a Maoist, ignores the drama playing out in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution over the question of the event of ­women.

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Badiou’s failure is astounding. Badiou’s philosophy of the event has proved valuable in rethinking historical method. Historical work now returns the f­ avor to uncover what is, even mea­sured by the rules of philosophy, a scholarly blunder: Badiou cannot discern a term, ­women, even during “the c­ entury,” in a book he wrote that is self-­importantly entitled The ­Century. Badiou’s philosophy of the event is complex, and it is a philosophy, as he himself defined it in his own enormous body of work. Yet he knows that he cannot avoid an essentially historical problematic, what he terms “the mistress of the moment: History.” And that is ­because, even he must admit, History is “the unshakeable support for any politics whatsoever.” Philosophy cannot avoid so­cio­log­ic­ al reasoning.16 ­There is no other place to hang the generic procedures. Still he strug­gles. Badiou’s history of “the ­century,” for instance, renames biology the bestial question. In the chapter “What Is Life?” he argues, “Knowledge must become the intuition of the organic value of ­things.”17 Now, logically, the discovery of organic, physiological pro­cesses should make it impossible to ignore the central role biowomen play in the organic value of every­thing—­particularly in sexual reproduction. Yet Badiou’s reference to the organic value of anatomical sexual difference comes in a toss-­away parenthesis regarding Paul Claudel, who defines ­woman as “a promise that cannot be kept.”18 Or let us take Badiou’s second thought characterizing the twentieth ­century, the “passion for the real,” which requires a fundamental restructuring of a bellicose new man, possessed by the ­will to power, and his third thought, via Bertolt Brecht, regarding the theatrical power of war in the making of the new man. We could take the fourth characteristic, the preeminence of ideology and theories of ideology, which is the power of the real conveyed by misrecognition but is also montage—­such as the montage of the Beiyang huabao, which makes a colonial modernity out of images of nudes, cars, flags, advertising icons, generals, and corpses. In Badiou’s complicated language, “semblance is the true situating princi­ple of the real,” meaning that the artistic arrangement pre­sents in its graphesis an ontology of which philosophy cannot speak.19 Even then, despite enormous, ephemeral reasoning and analytic evidence to the contrary, in Badiou’s complex investigations t­ here are no w ­ omen, no truth of ­woman, no female subject, no event of ­women, no physiological or “organic” or “gynecological” discovery leading to the subject ­women in evolutionary terms. ­There is nothing.

Conclusion  •  2 2 7

My ­earlier work asked how the event of ­women, an integral ele­ment of what defines the modern as such, could be absent in world-­scale analy­ sis both in precapitalist or cap­i­tal­ist takeoff studies and in their inverted form, the Eurasian paradigm. I was preoccupied with how the new globalist or regional histories might accommodate the event of ­women. If “­great divide” neoglobalists rest their case on contingency, as seems to be the case, then how could the question of ­women or proletarianized female ­labor power become so utterly epiphenomenal? How could world-­systems theory exclude the sexual division of l­abor as a cause or an indicator of modernity? But how could it include it?20 Inclusion, one might think, is the responsibility of gender historians. And yet Slavoj Žižek’s question about the “infinite multiple” of ­women in feminism has drawn attention to the fact that while gender scholars may claim that ­there is no w ­ oman as such, it supplies as proof of its own assertion a reference to infinite numbers of specific or “historical” ­women.21 In this study I have argued that ­women is not an impossible category and is not asserted through infinite multiples but rather is an event inherent in modernity; that is, the evental quality of ­women cannot be registered or written about or even acknowledged merely by changing the “scale” or “units” of analy­sis in play. Badiou claims that the proletarian in Marxist thought forms “the central void of early bourgeois society.”22 It is just as likely, my evidence suggests, that ­women is the name that twentieth-­ century thinkers—­sociologists, phi­los­o­phers, demographers, census takers, poets, and biologists—­gave to the “central void” of modern citizenship and consequently of the nation and nationalism. The central antagonism of modern middle-­class men and w ­ omen was precisely the deficient ground of the Enlightenment refusal to grant citizenship and thus subjective fullness to ­women as ­women.23 And if we seriously consider Badiou’s claim that the twentieth ­century is marked with anabasis, or the desire to return and reclaim community, then we cannot rest, for the subjects recaptured or made anew are always, in Jacques Nancy’s words, the “fraternal order”—­a masculine community poised to build the revolutionary f­ uture.24 And ­there is no real debate. Badiou is correct when he insists that in this ­century, historically, “the real is not represented, it is presented.”25 Many scholars, including historians, argue the same point, that the real may be encountered, manifested, fought over, attacked, or constructed, but it is not represented. Qu Qiubai’s terrible discovery of the powers of realist

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repre­sen­ta­tion immured him in the still-­ongoing event of ­women so the strug­gle is by no means over.26 In the Event of ­Women has built a case that the truth of ­women transformed the thinkable in philosophy and historiography, and not just in Eu­rope. The shared ground of theoretical translation and competitive mass marketing meant that the event of ­women occurred in the alleged periphery, even in an acephalous nation colonized, divided, and commercially restructured by imperialist, commercial capital, and again in a revolutionary state formation and its undoing, and continues, as this ­matter continues in China and elsewhere. Badiou’s attempts to make love to history fall apart ­here. Historically, the most enduring event of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—­the event of ­women— is illegible in his philosophy of the ­century. Even granting that phi­los­o­ phers “meditate philosophically” on historical questions, when Badiou says, “The question is not what took place in the ­century, but what was thought in it,” his conclusion admits defeat.27 In the immanent pro­cess of locating categories and reading historical catachreses, finding the disposition of as yet undefined terms in the so­cio­log­i­cal foundations of the modern Chinese order and in the ephemera that blanketed its modern environment, the immanency of the scientific is incontestably modern and highly saturated. Th ­ ere is no historical distinction among the gynecologist, the anatomist, the advertising agent, the commercial cap­i­tal­ist, and the corporate imperialist: t­ here is no difference among the socialite, the flapper, the girl student, the professional w ­ oman, the factory worker, the murdered under­ground Communist girl, or the prostituted movie star. They all show the anatomical nakedness of the new w ­ oman, ­women’s truth, and the montage or fantastic commercial arts that deliver her to the viewer as a subject or, as we have seen in chapter 6, as a strug­gle object. And each takes up the po­liti­cal strug­gle over the truth of ­women, in the event of ­women. But history cannot be just an imprecation against philosophy. As Badiou’s disciple Alberto Toscano argues in his addendum to The ­Century, speaking in the words of Frantz Fanon, “Come then, comrades, the Eu­ro­pean game has fi­nally ended; we must find something dif­f er­ent.”28 We ­will see. I do not fathom a way to square the circle yet. As my work suggests, the surfeit theorization in the modes of popu­lar and philosophical sociology saturating ephemera, mass images, and the physical and social environment; images of females in advertising campaigns for

Conclusion  •  2 2 9

foreign-­branded commodities; and Communist ­women with muscles show how an event of ­women is a constituent part of modernity. This is no longer debatable or avoidable. Massive, revolutionary conditions provided means for thinking a new truth of ­women; the new category, society, laid out in social science terms, established an ontology that has yet to be dislodged. Historians should not ignore the modernity of the event of ­women. If the biological body of a woman is alleged to be ahistorical, then historians ­will pursue the idea that anatomy is a naive puppet, that culture or psychic drives clothe subjectivities that change over time but merely “historically.” Only when ­women’s historians and historians as such recognize a po­liti­cal event of ­women in modern times ­will the mystery of gender be resolved. The global phenomenon of ­women as a category of modernity was constructed precisely with world-­scale ambitions—in the moment of commercial capital and the release of domestic commodities into new markets savagely carved out of older distribution networks. At the same time, ­women had to acknowledge (if not submit to) the protocols of the global to even be articulated. That is why the event of ­women in Chinese trading ports can be generalized as a universal. ­Women’s articulation was a singular launched from the multiple. Perhaps the better solution for Badiou’s dilemma is to reapproach philosophically the ambiguities of Mistress History.29

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Notes

Introduction to the Event 1 Kuai Dafu (1945–) put Wang on trial with the cooperation of the Central Committee and the Beijing ­People’s Liberation Army pla Garrison, according to Tang Shaojie. See Tang Shaojie, Yi ye zhi qiu, 51–53. 2 J. Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War, 242–43. 3 My use of the transcribed strug­gle against Wang draws inspiration from Russo, “ ‘Probable Defeat.’ ” 4 Coward et al., “Phospholipase Cζ.” The issue at stake is how, chemically speaking, sperm “induce” activity in eggs. The team finds that they do not yet know precisely how it happens, but they know this same inducement can be found in chickens. 5 Cobb, “Amazing 10 Years”; Briggs and Wessel, “In the Beginning . . .”; Hodge, ­Human Ge­ne­tics; Hayden, Evolutionary Rhe­toric. Wendy Hayden’s work particularly reinforces my argument. When laboratory scientist Johannes Friedrich Miescher (1844–1895) isolated nucleic acid and showed it played a role in inheritance and, in the mid-­twentieth c­ entury, this got the name of dna, social evolutionist theory claimed its definitive truth. 6 Judge, Republican Lens. 7 See Barlow, “ ‘ What Is a Poem?’ ” for Ernesto Laclau’s concept of context de­pen­ dency and conditions of visibility. 8 Benjamin, Illuminations, ch. 16, “­Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 9 Foucault, “Impossible Prison” (1980), in Foucault Live; White, Metahistory; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Bove, Critical Ontology. 10 Patton, “World Seen from Within,” 6. 11 Patton, “World Seen from Within.” 12 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu­rope, but particularly China historian Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation. Th ­ ese historians disavow history that is credible and true. 13 Bensaïd, “Alain Badiou,” 94–105. 14 Russo’s scholarly impact is impor­tant ­here. See Day, “Interpreting the Cultural Revolution Po­liti­cally,” for an overview. Jacques Rancière and Fredrick Cooper have also raised the salience of the po­liti­cal event. See Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson and The Names of History; and Cooper, Colonialism in Question. 15 Zupančič, “Fifth Condition.”

16 In Badiou’s philosophy the po­liti­cal sequence is so rare that truths cannot be considered continuous, structural, or subterranean (as per the Annales school or Foucault or even Badiou’s own in-­house critic, Sylvain Lazarus) but are always in Badiou’s system truth in a fitful, absolute, ontological disruption. Only t­ hose who make revolutions—­logician Paul Cohen, poets William Shakespeare and Paul Celan, po­liti­cal theorist/actor Mao Zedong, phi­los­o­pher of love Sigmund Freud—­make history. O ­ thers exist ­under conditions neither of their own making nor in any zone of awareness that would merit the term history or historical subject. We vegetate or, in fealty, militate for already existing truth. 17 I do not evaluate Badiou’s efforts to dispute charges of ahistoricism and philosophical authoritarianism. Between The ­Century (2005), essays written in the 1990s allegedly to produce a “history” of how the c­ entury thought itself, and in the 2009 volume Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, Badiou attempted to address the issues I am raising ­here. Two essays in The ­Century (“Sex in Crisis” and “Anabasis”) can be usefully read for his continuing philosophical and historical weakness. In the first case, Badiou is forced to argue that the real of sex has no relation to historical physiology discoveries. See Myung Mi Kim’s “Anna O Addendum” for a clever grasp of how Freud dealt with the “real of sex” by making the ­woman an addendum. In “Anabasis,” Badiou again balks at the implications of his own analy­sis. In the same book, The ­Century, he speculates that historical modernism/modernity “is witness to a profound mutation of the question of the ‘we,’ ” and still ends investigation denying any possibility of a we that includes w ­ omen: “How are we to move from the fraternal ‘we’ of the epic to the disparate ‘we’ of togetherness, of the set, without ever giving up on the demand that ­there be a ‘we’?” 97. I can think of many ways to resolve this rhetorical question. But as in most discussions of coming community, Badiou makes no effort to comprehend a “we” that includes evental historical w ­ oman ­because the real of sex ( Jacques Lacan) can never be the real of the social, the social sex, the ­woman, even the fantastic phallic ­woman. It appears that when he de­cided recently to reengage the dialectic, Badiou has taken the criticism more seriously. His formula of “demo­cratic materialism” is forwarded in Logics of Worlds and in “Affirmative Dialectics: From Logic to Anthropology.” 18 Lam, Passion for Facts. I regret that I am unable to integrate Arunabh Ghosh’s 2020 monograph, Making It Count, into this discussion. See Ping Zhu, Gender and Subjectivities, for the “anamorphic feminine,” meaning an inescapable feminine assumed as an ele­ment of modernity that Chinese intellectuals sought for China. 19 Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi’s Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 demonstrates the transformative impact of financial capital’s tools and methods (bookkeeping, branding, franchising, distribution, commercialization, ­etc.) using commodified opium as its focus. 20 In her article “The Fifth Condition,” Zupančič sketches out her view that to unravel the double bind Badiou should return to a psychoanalytic reconsideration of the politics of repre­sen­ta­tion, or psychoanalytic semiotics. Zupančič would

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21 22 23

24 25 26

no doubt find my argument hard to swallow. Unfortunately, ­there is no way to follow her further ­here without g­ oing completely off track, but Zupančič’s rebuke is to return Badiou back to what is potentially a feminist position. Citing Badiou “La Scène du Deux,” Zupančič reiterates Badiou’s own Lacanian point that Two “would be counted for two in an immanent way . . . ​, where Two is neither fusion nor a sum; and where Two is thus in excess over that what constitutes it, without ­there being a Third [term] to join it.’ ” Zupančič, Shortest Shadow, 147. The impression Zupančič leaves is that ­were one to follow out her statement and Lacan’s insight through Badiou, one would encounter a “pure disjunction,” and this pure disjunction might be borrowed into the conceptualization of the ­woman subject. This would put Lacan in the midst of the Chinese theorization of sexual difference in the 1920s and 1930s, according to Howard Chiang in ­A fter Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. Bensaïd, “Alain Badiou,” 94–105 Bensaïd, “Alain Badiou,” 101; my emphasis. Drucker, “Graphesis,” 19. “To conceptualize graphesis as visual epistemology,” she argues, means pictorial graphs are a way of presenting meaning. ­There is a debate over how Drucker defined her term in a ­later major publication, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. I use the 2011 paper b­ ecause I like the term visual epistemology. Drucker, Graphesis, 15–16: “Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as pre­sen­ta­tion . . . ​arguments made in graphical form.” W. Yeh, Becoming Chinese. Two major monographs on the technology transfer of biology and “the view of modern life,” that is, a conjuncture of Kantianism and popu­lar biopsychology, have established that elite and popu­lar science or scientism tremendously affected how literate ­people understood their lives. ­These are Gad C. Issy’s The Philosophy of the View of Life in Modern Chinese Thought and Laurence Schneider’s Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-­Century China. Both reworked Danny Wynn Ye Kwok’s 1965 classic Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950. Scientism—in Kwok’s words, “the attitude that science, in its function as an accurate natu­ral discipline, as a total system of nature [was] capable of informing physical existence and of categorizing ­human life and society”—­and science proper have captivated the historiography of China since the 1960s, just as they did Chinese cultural critics and science journalists in China during the 1920s and 1930s. Historians in the Modern Girl around the World Research Group have established the generic model of the “modern girl.” See Modern Girl around the World Research Group, Modern Girl around the World.

Chapter 1: Conditions of Thinking 1 “Although Andersen, Meyer, & Com­pany Ltd. is an American corporation and the Board of Directors meets in New York, the administrative office of the Com­pany is located in Shanghai.” Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer and Com­pany, 1. The ceo of

Notes to Chapter One  •  2 3 3

amco, Vilhelm Meyer, came from a background in finance banking, but amco sought capital everywhere, including Fearon, Daniel and Com­pany, an insurance com­pany linked to General Electric Com­pany, and Mutual Life Insurance Com­ pany underwrote amco’s engineering department. 2 Armand, “Digging Up Lost Billboards.” 3 Peng Changxin’s “Zhongguo jindai gongye sheji de xianqu—­Shenchang yanghang de jianzhu shijian” details the architectural contribution to reinforced-­ concrete building construction. See Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes. 4 Peng Changxin, “Zhongguo jindai gongye sheji de xianqu.” 5 Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer and Com­pany, 2. 6 Meyer gathered $350,000 in new capital investment and reor­ga­nized his firm into a stock com­pany with Galen L. Stone and Willard D. Straight in order to capitalize on a relationship with a finance com­pany called Pacific Commercial Com­pany of Manila. ­After amco was acquired by this finance com­pany, its capital increased to $1 million and then to $5 million. The Pacific Commercial Com­pany went bankrupt in the recession of 1920–1922 but, with the support of ge, Baldwin Locomotive Works, Saco Lowell, and other manufacturers, amco survived, restructured but intact. When Pacific Commercial liquidated, amco became an arm of the International General Electric Com­pany. See Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer and Com­ pany, 4–5. 7 ­Unless other­wise noted, all information about global electrification can be confirmed with reference to Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global Electrification. For ­earlier discussions of finance capitalism, see Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, which notes, “The chief function of foreign banks in China was to finance foreign trade and to ­handle foreign exchange transactions. As late as the early 1930s over 90% of the total import and export business in Shanghai was still financed by foreign banks” (54). 8 Garke, Pro­gress of Electrical Enterprise, cited in Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global Electrification. See Henry, Assimilating Seoul, for how this worked in Seoul and Tokyo. 9 Christian Henriot has posted photo­graphs of the electrical stations and a map of the French Concession’s electrification, like an amco ad, on the website “Virtual Shanghai.” 10 Christopher Bo Bramsen’s Open Doors: Vilhelm Meyer and the Establishment of General Electric in China notes that Meyer became the sole agent for ge in 1906, but it was not ­until 1920 that the relationship took off and ge/amco products began selling well in China. This chronology is legible in the pattern of advertising. 11 Yamamura, “Zaibatsu, Prewar, and Zaibatsu, Postwar.” 12 It appears that in En­glish the idea that “market” is a place or spatially demarked area enters the language in the late nineteenth ­century. It is a modernist term, to put a fine point on this, see Oxford En­glish Dictionary, https://­www​.­oed​.­com​ /­view​/­Entry​/­114178​?­rskey​=v­ mWMSp&result​=1­ &isAdvanced​=­false#eid, accessed

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December 27, 2020. Before then, market was transitive: “to market” or “­going to the market,” but not in the sense of “opening markets” or marketing. Theories of marketing may precede “the market”: advertising might be the prose of transitive marketing activity. 13 Cheng, “United States Petroleum Trade with China,” 210. 14 Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global Electrification. Also see Cox, Global Cigarette; and Lenin, “Finance Capital and the Po­liti­cal Oligarchy.” 15 Bramsen, Open Doors. 16 Garke, Pro­gress of Electrical Enterprise, cited in Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global Electrification. Also see Henriot, “Virtual Shanghai.” The same advertising and selling techniques appeared in the United States and treaty-­port China at around the same time. 17 Etemad and Luciani, World Energy Production, cited in Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global Electrification, 19, 28. Japan ranked well from 1905 despite its catastrophic imperial adventures, or perhaps ­because of them, meaning it was around the same level as France, the United Kingdom, and Italy. 18 Bickers, “Fly on an Elephant’s Back.” 19 See the Chinese Commercial Advertising Archive I cofounded with Professor Chen Jing, Nanjing University (https://­ccaa​.­nju​.­edu​.­cn​/­html​/­index​.­html). With generous support from the Luce Foundation and the Rice University History Department, the website archives “metadates” ads in five cities. See Manovich, “Metadating the Image.” 20 Pär Kristoffer Cassel’s Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-­Century China and Japan is a recent example. Works that lay new historiographical emphasis on financialization, trade, and fixed commodities include Bickers and Jackson, Treaty Ports in Modern China; Bickers and Howlett, Britain and China; and Bickers and Henriot, New Frontiers. See also Betta, “Myth and Memory”; Kent, “Prob­lems of Circulation”; and Reinhardt, Navigating. 21 Barlow, “Semifeudalism, Semicolonialism.” 22 Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global Electrification, 37; my emphasis. 23 Karl, China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, 90. 24 Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men. 25 Zhang Weibao, Luo, and Zhao, “Yousheng zhuanshuai.” 26 Robert Gardella, Jane K. Leonard, and Andrea McElderry, eds., “Chinese Business History: Interpretive Trends and Priorities for the ­Future, special issue of Chinese Studies in History 31, nos. 3–4 (1998). 27 Cochran, Big Business in China. 28 See Zhang and Zhao, “Nanyang xiongdi de guanli zhibai.” Also see Zhang, Luo, and Zhao, “Yousheng zhuanshuai.” In recent years, China-­based historians are writing business history, but the heritage of the cultural argument remains strong, and what “Chinese” indicates in the context of a multinational llc has not been clarified.

Notes to Chapter One  •  2 3 5

29 Tobacco: An Illustrated Weekly noted in its April 15, 1920, issue that a shipment of $1.5 million worth of U.S. tobacco had left San Francisco for Hong Kong and Shanghai, to be rolled into Chinese Nanyang Bros. cigarettes. See “From the Firing Line.” 30 Köll, “Nanyang ­Brothers Tobacco.” 31 Kwan, Beyond Market and Hierarchy. On the basis of early manuscripts that Kwan shared with me, I have been able to demonstrate a fallacy in thinking that national products expressed national capital and sold in national markets to strengthen the nation in my ­earlier publications. I thank him again for his early generosity and congratulate him on the publication of his work in monograph form. 32 Metzler, Lever of Empire. 33 Zelin, “Informal Law and the Firm in Early Modern China”; Kirby, “China Unincorporated.” 34 Zelin, “Informal Law and the Firm in Early Modern China,” 167. 35 Morgan, “Transfer of Taylorist ideas to China.” Thanks to Professor Morgan for alerting me to this impor­tant essay. Morgan notes a blip of interest in corporate forms and business practices among some Chinese readers and perhaps entrepreneurs when he notes that Eastern Miscellany ran many discussions about scientific management, industrial psy­chol­ogy and rationalization of production. 36 See Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men, and other work. Cochran understands business practices in the framework of culturalism, as does Gary Hamilton. See Hamilton, Commerce and Capitalism. Thanks to Rebecca Karl for flagging the point about Mao strategy. 37 Zuo, Zhongguo jindai shangbiao jianshi, 1–63. Also see Bowker, Copyright. 38 Lury, Brands, 98. 39 “Trade ­house Optorg—­diversifying from its ancient activities in Russia—­moved to Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1923 and started ­there [sic] import trade of goods (mainly wool cloth, but also spirits and champagne, pharmaceutics) which it delivered against promissory notes, and bic Hong Kong became its leverage in Asia; it collected its remittances on Hong Kong, fueled exchange contracts (frf 982,000 in 1931), and carried a large portfolio of bills drawn on Chinese clients ($82,000 on I. P. Hang Fong in 1931) for goods stored at the name of the bank pending sales.” Bonin, “French Banks in Hong Kong,” 14. 40 Trademark Gazette, December 15, 1928, 269, 270, 275, and 77. 41 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream. Also see Modern Girl around the World Research Research Group, Modern Girl around the World. 42 According to Ellen Laing’s “The British American Tobacco Com­pany Advertising Department and Four of Its Calendar Poster Artists,” bat’s advertising department, founded in 1915, employed Shanghai school commercial artists. See also Zhongguo Kexueyuan, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao. 43 Qu Zhengming, “Hong xibao yu yongtai he yancao gongsi.” 44 Barlow, “Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History.” 45 Cox, Global Cigarette, 161.

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•  Notes to Chapter One

46 Cox, Global Cigarette, 30. 47 For full details on the New York brand’s advertising rhe­toric and images, see Barlow, “Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History.” 48 Witzel, History of Management Thought, 125–26. 49 Hilferding, Finance Capital. 50 Hilferding, Finance Capital, 22. 51 “The transition from commercial to investment credit is also apparent in international markets. In the early stages of development, ­England (and Dutch policy was similar in the early period of capitalism) extended commercial credit to countries which bought En­glish products, while paying for a larger proportion of her own imports in cash. The situation is dif­fer­ent t­ oday: credit is not provided exclusively or mainly in the form of commercial credit, but for capital investment, the object of which is to gain control of foreign production.” Hilferding, “The Banks and Industrial Credit,” ch. 5 in Finance Capital; my emphasis. 52 Wagel, Finance in China, 260. 53 Wagel, Finance in China, 261–62. 54 Wagel, Finance in China, 300. 55 Edkins, Banking and Prices in China, 19, 26. 56 Ji Zhaojin, History of Modern Shanghai Banking. 57 Crow, preface, cited in Liang and Lin, “Historical Value.” 58 Hilferding, preface to Finance Capital. 59 Lingzhen Wang, ­Women’s Autobiographical Practice. 60 Modern Girl around the World Research Group, Modern Girl around the World. 61 Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 463. 62 Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 465. 63 Benjamin, “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus,” 293. 64 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism. 65 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 152. 66 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 152 67 Meillassoux, “Decision and Undecidability of the Event,” 25. 68 I am drawing on the tradition in Jacques Derrida’s thinking that considers originality and authority: “­There is fi­nally a signature, which is not the signature one calculated, which is naturally not the patronymic name, which is not the set of stratagems elaborated in order to propose something original or inimitable. But, w ­ hether one like it or not, ­there is an ‘effect of the idiom for the other.’” Derrida, “Jacques Derrida, ­There Is No ‘One’ Narcissism (Autobiophotographies)”; my emphasis. 69 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 57. 70 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 63. 71 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 102. 72 L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 118. 73 Extending Hobbesian and Rousseauian arguments, He-­Yin doubtless read the Japa­nese translation about the state of nature (brute force) and the rise of private-­ property regimes. He-­Yin’s essay “Economic Revolution and ­Women’s Revolution”

Notes to Chapter One  •  2 3 7

74 75 76 77

78

argues that ­after the rise of the slave mode of production, China became a special kind of hell. Livelihood issues led to the prostitution-­marriage system, concubinage, female suicide, illicit affairs, and marriage markets where rape, philandering, bitterness, wallowing in sorrow, starvation, and hopelessness became the norm for ­women of all classes. Lewdness and obscenity result from the fact that “when a man sees a ­woman what appears before him is merely a commodity that money can buy.” L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 96; my emphasis. L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 103; my emphasis. L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 106; my emphasis. L. Liu, Karl, and Ko, Birth of Chinese Feminism, 107. The polemical, painfully conflicting logics and desires—­revenge or love, murder or erotic engagement, love or kill—­rested on Wang Zhong’s (1745–1794) ­earlier critique of the chastity cult and He-­Yin’s understanding of Edward Jenks (1861– 1939), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Japa­nese anarchists, and Chinese scholar-­ theorists Cheng Yichou (1725–1814), Fang Bao (1668–1749), and Gui Youguang (1507–1571). This shows her scholarly capacity and the depth of her citational practices. “A Dual Mishap—­Tram Collides with Motor Car,” Shanghai Times, May 27, 1920. Thanks to Victor K. Seow for sending me this news clipping.

Chapter 2: Foundational Chinese Sociology 1 Howard Chiang’s ­After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China shows that Chinese thinkers absorbed the intellectual impact of the anatomical revolution that began in 1851 with Benjamin Hobson’s publication of clinical drawings taken from autopsy dissections of male and female reproductive organs. Gradually, the life science of physiology moved ­toward the center of the discussion. See Andrews, Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, for the po­liti­cal evolution of “Western medicine” and its body. 2 Lorraine Wong explores Qu’s similarity to international Marxism and Marxists. See Wong, “Language ­Matters in Global Communism.” 3 Foucault, Order of Th ­ ings. 4 Yang Yabin in Zhongguo shehuixue shi aims to “trace the historical trajectory of the Chinese sociology” (2). See also Yan Ming, Yimen xueke, yige shidai; Y.-­C. Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China. 5 Yao, Shehuixue zai jindai Zhongguo de jincheng. 6 “When,” Sang wrote, “the research is conducted on the transformation of knowledge systems, the ideal situation would be si­mul­ta­neously providing keys on understanding the tradition, the knowledge-­generating pro­cess, as well as understanding the pre­sent and grasping the ­future.” Sang, “Wanqing minguo de zhishi yu zhidu tixi zhuanxing,” 20. 7 Kantianism’s importance in Chinese letters has not been adequately addressed although its aesthetics was widely known in this era. Hannah Ginsborg suggests

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Eu­ro­pean and anglophone scholarship ignores Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, perhaps ­because Kant tied aesthetics to naturalistic teleologies. Ginsborg, “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology.” 8 A sympode or sympodium is “an axis that develops when growth occurs by means of lateral branches rather than continuing along the principal stem, often having a zigzag or irregular form.” Also called pseudaxis. See The ­Free Dictionary, s.v. “sympodium,” accessed August 18, 2017, http://­www​.­thefreedictionary​.­com​ /­Sympodium. 9 Doleželová-Velingerová and Wagner, Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge, 1–28. 10 Foucault, Order of Th ­ ings. 11 Doleželová-Velingerová and Wagner, Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge, 8. 12 This section is indebted to Doleželová-Velingerová and Wagner, Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge. 13 Mill, Montesquieu, Comte, and Huxley are foundational figures in the establishment of philosophical sociology. That fact makes Yan an undersung hero of Chinese sociology, for he chose and translated all of them. Yan’s grasp of sociology and philosophy was unparalleled among Chinese thinkers in his time. Unlike most social phi­los­o­phers, he resembled He-­Yin Zhen, who used Japa­nese neologisms in her theorizations ­because she lived in Japan and read Japa­nese general theory and Japa­nese anarchism. 14 Howland, Personal Liberty and Public Good, 70. 15 Thanks to Barbara Mittler and Kaja Müller-­Wang, who allowed me access to their online version of the New Erya while I was in China. heidenc, Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg, http://­www​.­zo​.­uniheidelberg​.­de​/­sinologie​/­digital​ _­resources​/­heidenc​/­. 16 Wang Rongbao and Ye, Xin Erya; my emphasis. 17 Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity. 18 Yan Fu, Tianyanlun. 19 Ishikawa Yoshihiro, “Chinese Translations from Japa­nese of Works on Socialism, 1919–1922,” in History of the Formation of the Chinese Communist Party, 443–58. The En­glish translation of Ishikawa’s article that was published in Sino-­Japanese Studies (2009) states that Yamakawa Kikue was the translator of Ward’s famous essay and that both Li Da and Xia Mianzun translated it from Japa­nese into Chinese. It is curious that the Chinese translated only Ward’s essay and not Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex, which Yamakawa also translated and released with the Ward essay. Nick Knight notes that Li used the Sakai Toshihiko translation released in 1921. Knight, Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China, 308. 20 Gong and Liu, “Li Da yu Qu Qiubai de funü guan bijiao.” 21 Engels’s book arrived in Rus­sian in 1894 and in Japa­nese in 1922. See Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, 44–46. Also see Suzuki, Becoming Modern ­Women, 136.

Notes to Chapter Two  •  2 3 9

22 Kang, Kang Youwei xiansheng yizhu huikan, riben shumuzhi. Kang Youwei was not a sociologist but knew that Chinese students accessed Eu­ro­pean philosophy through the Meiji social sciences. Kang started his bibliography with the category of physiology and in ­doing so recognized the philosophical significance of the anatomical body. Further research might show that Kang had read Ward, though it is not likely. Still, Kang echoes the Wardian argument that physiology is the key to understanding ­human sexual reproduction and social evolution and outstrips anatomy ­because physiology is a temporal pro­cess linked to the prob­lem of ­human awareness, our semi-­instinctual keenness to make good eugenic choices, and the ability to share or to oppress. 23 Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 shows how particularly Egypt-­based scholars worked the same set of texts as Chinese intellectuals. She finds a dif­fer­ent range of interests and dif­fer­ent conclusions than I have and this is no doubt ­because under­lying conditions of thought ­were dif­f er­ent. 24 Zhong Shaohua, “Studies on the Characteristics of Late Qing Encyclopaedia Entries.” 25 This section is adapted from Barlow, “ ‘History’s Coffin Can Never Be Closed.’ ” The online dictionary Hudong baike (Interactive encyclopedia) provides the history of the organ­ization “Society for Social Improvement in Beijing” (see http://­www​.­baike​.­com​/­wiki​/社 ­ 会实进会, accessed December 21, 2020), which began in 1913 u­ nder the auspices of the ymca and included social-­service and social-­ survey activities like ­those described in Yan Ming’s book Yimen xueke, yige shidai. 26 Yu, Qu qiubai xueshu sixiang pingzhuan, 112–13. Qu began Russian-­language studies in the old-­school way, by translating lit­er­a­ture. He chose Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Nicolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, and Ivan Turgenev before turning his attention to August Bebel, Georgi Plekhanov, and the Rus­sian New Phi­los­o­phers. 27 Knight, Marxist Philosophy in China, 18, 20. See 10n18 for evaluation of Nicolai Bukharin’s probable influence and pages 13–28 for the introduction to international Marxism that Qu appears to have read. Knight’s thesis on “determinism” is the basis of this section. 28 Knight, Marxist Philosophy in China, 33. 29 Knight, Marxist Philosophy in China, 32; and Knight, Marxist Philosophy and Social Theory, ch. 2. 30 Qu Qiubai, Qu Qiubai wenji, 1015–40. 31 Chinese-­to-­English translation creates phrases that do not appear in En­glish. Read “raped logic” meta­phor­ically and it makes perfect sense. 32 Qu Qiubai, Qu Qiubai wenji, 1020. 33 See Feng, “Qu Qiubai zaoqi fanyi huodong shuping.” Feng argues that Qu, in his essays, not only has deep sympathy and concern for ­women in the man-­eating Old Society but also investigates the root cause of the oppression of ­women, arguing that ­women are spiritually in jail and bound by many shackles, such as feudal ethics, Confucian codes, the ­family system, social organ­ization, and the notion that the sexes are oppositional.

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•  Notes to Chapter Two

34 Chen Tiejian, Qu Qiubai zhuan. 35 Bebel, W ­ omen and Socialism, 97–98. 36 This would appear, contextually, to have been August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767– 1845), who translated Shakespeare into German and advocated the intellectualization of romantic love. 37 Bebel, ­Women and Socialism, 240. 38 Bebel, ­Women and Socialism, 471. 39 Knight’s monograph Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China establishes that Chinese Marxism is a form of Soviet Marxism and not an orientalist deviation. Knight traces arguments in the German, Rus­sian, and Chinese traditions to underscore Mao’s internationalism and carefully notes Li’s lifelong commitment to sexual difference and social justice but chooses not to pursue this line of analy­sis. Knight, Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China, 63–64. I focus on Li’s 1926 Modern Sociology and not his 1937 magnum opus, Li Da shehuixue dagang. 40 Ward split from the socialist camp, saying explic­itly that he was d­ oing “pure sociology.” Ward, Pure Sociology, vii. Pure meant scientific and not po­liti­cal. He disavowed all social usefulness for his work. The implication is that a scientist (he was originally a botanist) is not swayed by social movements or mores, and the value of pure sociology is its scienticity. 41 Knight, Marxist Philosophy and Social Theory, ch. 2. 42 Knight, Marxist Philosophy and Social Theory, 155. 43 Li Da, Shehuixue dagang. ­Because his overarching concern is to demonstrate that Chinese Marxism was “orthodox,” Knight’s conclusions override points that would show the singularity of Li Da. This is particularly true of the ­women’s question, which Knight carefully footnotes but does not pursue exegetically. 44 Li Da, Xiandai shehuixue, 16. 45 Li Da, Xiandai shehuixue, 32. 46 Li Da, Xiandai shehuixue, 21. 47 The status of the debate over the matriarchal stage of Chinese history remains to be analyzed. To my knowledge, no con­temporary scholar is working on this prob­lem. 48 See Y.-­C. Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China.

Chapter 3: Vernacular Sociology 1 On Schaff ’s contribution to the debate over the role of the ­future anterior in Marxist philosophy, see Petrilli and Ponzio, “Adam Schaff.” The essay analyzes a famous debate over Marxist humanism between Schaff and Althusser, a structuralist Marxist. Schaff took the position that all philosophy is written in the ­future anterior. The statement “By next year I ­will have completed this book” is not philosophical but encodes anticipation that hard work ­today ­will prove successful. The statement “In five years the Chinese working class in itself and for itself ­will have seized control over the means of production” is both a philosophical aspiration

Notes to Chapter Three  •  2 41

and a practical statement. However unlikely to occur, this revolutionary prediction is an expectation many ­people have lived and died attempting to achieve. 2 Bray, Technology and Gender. See also Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. 3 Barlow, Question of ­Women in Chinese Feminism, ch. 3. 4 Zarrow, Educating China. 5 Yan Fu, Tianyanlun. 6 T. Shen, “Evolutionism through Chinese Eyes”; Wang Xiaodan, Fanyi shihua. 7 Shiao, “Culture, Commerce, and Connections.” 8 T. Shen, “Evolutionism through Chinese Eyes,” 23. 9 Fan, “Shehui kexue he benneng de wenti,” 2–3. 10 Fan, “Shehui kexue he benneng de wenti,” 2–3. 11 Wang Xiaodan, Fanyi shihuo, 88–98. 12 “In view of his work as a standardizer it is strange to discover how eclectic and perhaps even disor­ga­nized Yan Fu [was]. Yan Fu’s neologisms had ­little influence on the terminology which followed, in contrast to the ideas in his translations, which ­were enormously influential.” Wright, “Yan Fu and the Tasks of the Translator,” 242, 245. 13 Reynolds, East Meets East. 14 Wang Xiaodan, Fanyi shihuo, esp. ch. 2, p. 37. 15 Wang, Fanyi shihuo, 49. 16 The translation by Mai Zhonghua was published in 1902 and 1903. The translation by Min Housa was published in 1903 and 1915. 17 See Li, “Guoqing,” for his views on Ariga. 18 Howland, Translating the West, 51–54. 19 Howland, Translating the West, 52, 207n49. The article Howland cites is Ariga’s “Shina no kaimei to seiyo no kaimei to no sabestsu,” 357–64, 368–75. 20 In 1877 a Japa­nese translation of Herbert Spencer stabilized the term for “society” as shakai. Ariga’s 1883 publication of On Social Evolution and his part in renaming Tokyo Imperial University’s department of sociology as Shakaigaku confirmed that shakai would henceforth be what Howland calls “the preferred term for the new abstraction ‘society.’ ” Howland, Translating the West, 173. 21 Figal, Civilization and Monsters, 52–73. The creativity of Japa­nese social theorists detracts nothing from Yan’s achievement. The gifted natu­ral and social scientist Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941) found in the relation of social and natu­ral science a source of creative so­cio­log­i­cal speculation. Minakata, Minakata Kumagusu nikki. 22 Ariga, Shehui jinhua lun, 1. All cites of Ariga’s Shehui jinhua lun are from the 1902 edition. 23 Ariga, Shehui jinhua lun, 20, 84. Ariga argues that society is organistic and thus just like a living organism in some re­spects, per Herbert Spencer. However, since socie­ ties are not literally alive, sociology, although analogous to physiology, differs from it since it plays a regulatory role in national social evolutionary pro­gress. Ariga’s

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24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

historical sociology (and canonical sociology, generally speaking) proposed that property relations and regulations caused the evolution of ­human society from rampant primitive social life to the nation. Ariga, Shehui jinhua lun, 53–55. Ariga, Shehui jinhua lun, 9. Endo, Jinshi shehuixue. Endo, Jinshi shehuixue, 212. Endo, Jinshi shehuixue, 245. Takezawa, “Transcending the Western Paradigm of the Idea of Race,” 14–18. Shibue was likely influenced by Karl Gützlaff ’s Wanguo dili quantuji, particularly the “Borneo” part, cited in Shakaigaku (Sociology). On Shibue’s debt to John Ruskin and William Morris, see Kikuchi, Japa­nese Modernisation and Mingei Theory, 25. Shibue wrote on Poland and po­liti­cal partition, as well as on Otto von Bismarck, which suggests he was ­either a professional academic translator or a new-­style social or po­liti­cal scientist. See Shibue, Pōrando Suibō Senshi. Shibue Tomotsu, translated by Jin Minglua, Shehuixue zhilun 4, 1903. Ishikawa, “Anti-­Manchu Racism and the Rise of Anthropology in Early 20th ­Century China”; and Simpson, “Sir Daniel Wilson and the Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.” See Yan Enchun, Jiating jinghualun. A glossary of pop so­cio­log­i­cal publications is available as an index at the back of Yan’s book. Guo, “Benneng.” Leon Rocha notes that German intellectual history has multiple terms for instinct. Email to author, November 19, 2009. Guo, “Benneng.” Amanda Spink summarizes the history of instinct theory. Spink, Information Be­hav­ior, 3–5. Gray, “Spalding, His Influence on Research in Developmental Be­hav­ior.” See Uhls, “Lu Xun–­Huxley–­Nietzsche”; and Deleuze, Bergsonism. Every­one from Georgi Plekhanov to Charles Pierce, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Henry James—­many known to Chinese intellectuals—­ criticized Bergson. Yan Yucheng, “Fei benneng lun zhi piping.” Barlow, Question of ­Women in Chinese Feminism. Yan Jibo, “Faming shi renlei de benneng. L.-­K . Sun, Chinese National Character, 3. Zhou, “Lian’ai de yiyi yü jiazhi.” Yan Wei, “Nüzi tiyü yanjiu.” On the social prob­lem of suicide, see Goodman, “New ­Woman Commits Suicide.” Letourneau, “Lihun de jinhua.” Lionel Tiger is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Now in his eighties, he has for sixty years been the pioneer in neovernacular sociology or social Darwinist popu­lar anglophone ideologies.

Notes to Chapter Three  •  2 4 3

48 Gao Junzhe, “Shehuixue de shengwu xuepai.” 49 See Dikötter, Discourse of Race in Modern China; Dikötter, Imperfect Conceptions; and also Stern, “Unraveling the History of Eugenics in Mexico.” 50 Chung, “Eugenics in China and Hong Kong.” In The Question of ­Women in Chinese Feminism, I argue that scientific racism is a core ele­ment of progressive feminism. 51 Sakamoto, “Cult of ‘Love and Eugenics’ in May Fourth Movement Discourse.” 52 Yan Wei, “Nüzi tiyu yanjiu.” 53 Pan, “Shengyu xianzhi yu youshengxue.” 54 Pan, “Yousheng yu wenhua”; and Sun Benwen, “Zai lun wenhua yu youshengxue.” 55 Although not sociologists, the reformer Kang Youwei and his phi­los­o­pher disciple Tan Sitong (1865–1898) argued that improving sexual relations was the state’s responsibility.

Chapter 4: The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera 1 Xu Xiuli, “Saochu wenmang, zuoyu xinmin.” Also see Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujinhui, Shimin qianzi ke. 2 J. Ernest Black, August 1930, Trinity College Digital Collections, https://­ digitalrepository​.­trincoll​.­edu​/­. 3 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 76, 134, 159. 4 Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, N1a, 6. 5 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 76, 134, 159. 6 This is my reservation with Anne McClintock’s pioneering Imperial Leather. 7 See Badiou, “Subject of Art”; and Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 460–63. I loosen and even invert Badiou’s t­ heses on po­liti­cal voluntarism. Also see Black, “Advertising in Shanghai,” app. II, which lists the sizes, cost, and estimated distribution of newspapers in Shanghai along with the mechanical requirements for setting ads. Black judged the ad industry too chaotic and corrupt, needing Americanization. 8 Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the En­glish Language; Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the En­glish Language, Unabridged (Springfield, MA: Merriam, 1961), s.v. “International Scientific Vocabulary”; and “International Scientific Vocabulary,” Merriam-­Webster’s online, https://­www​.­merriam​-­webster​.­com/, accessed December 23, 2020. For a brief history of how isv works, see https://­en​ .­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­International​_­scientific​_­vocabulary. Many scholars disparaged isv, but it is just another system of calques. See Morton, Story of Webster’s Third. 9 See Romaine, Cambridge History of the En­glish Language; and Durkin, Borrowed Words, which both establish the history of modern En­glish and International Scientific Vocabulary to bridge gaps in scientific references during the international scientific revolution, as well as Neo-­Latin, which surfaced in En­glish in the 1840s and 1850s. 10 Pound, The Confucian Odes. Professor C. J. Chen Jing has collaborated with me on the Luce Foundation–­funded Ephemera Proj­ect at the Chao Center for Asian

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Studies. Her pioneering work interprets technical means for interpreting ephemera and she has thoughtfully created this rendition. https://­ccaa​.­nju​.­edu​.­cn​/­html​ /­index​.­html, accessed February 22, 2021. 11 Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land; and Alloula, Colonial Harem. 12 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 10. Muñoz proposes that “ephemera is always about specificity and resisting dominant systems of aesthetic and institutional classification . . . ​without abstracting them outside of social experience and a larger notion of sociality [since ephemera] is firmly anchored within the social.” ­Here I argue that ephemera establish the social. 13 Ding Song, Minguo fengqin baimei tu; and Ding Song, Ding Song manhuaji. 14 Joan Judge gets close to this argument in her Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press. Catherine Yeh noted the association of modern-­women images and advanced technology. Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love. 15 Su Shangda, Guanggaoxue gailun, also cited in Morgan, “Selling Chinese Dreams.” I appreciate Morgan’s generosity (private letter, July 22, 2014). See ch. 1 of Su’s study for the history of Vee Loo and bat. Also see Shanghai difangzhi bangongshi, ch. 12, “Di shier pian: Guanggao shangye” [Advertising business]. This source notes the 1915 founding of Parme’s Italian agency, but ­there is no business history yet for this agency. 16 Zhu Shuai, “Guanggaoshi yanjiu zai zhongguo.” 17 Ling, China’s Pro­gress in Advertising. Thanks to Ms. Yunzhu Bamboo Zhu, who located materials at the Shanghai Municipal Archive (email, March 13, 2016). Nakayama was first to use the advertising balloon in Tokyo, 1913. See Clark Parker, “The Tokyo Files,” October 13, 2015, for a photo­graph of the event. https://­thetokyofiles​.­com​/­2015​/­10​/­13​/­balloons​-­on​-­the​-­ginza​-­float​-­young​ -­advertisers​-­1890​-­1989​/­. 18 See Barlow and Chen, “Jintan Distribution Networks in Five Treaty Port Commercial Newspapers.” Also, Ling’s China’s Pro­gress in Advertising includes a map of Ling’s empire. See Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, for the branding of Sun-­Maid made in California. 19 Zhu Shuai, a Beijing University historian, has recently made an argument similar to mine. In “Guanggaoshi yanjiu zai zhongguo: Jiyu shixueshi shijiao de yizhong fansi,” he mentions that as the first systematic research work on advertising in China, Jiang Yuquan’s Shiyong guanggaoxue, has nine chapters that include topics such as definition of ads, history of ads, tendencies in modern advertising, and so on. Available materials on C. P. Ling are held in the Shanghai Archive, “China Commercial Advertising Agency” (C. P. Ling, Proprietor, Report on Audit of Accounts for the Period From July 1, 1926, To December 31, 1931). Haskins & Sells” and “China Commercial Advertising Agency, Ltd. Advertising Merchandising Council, Shanghai, China, September 12, 1928” both include material about how the agency worked and how it made profits. 20 Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, 32.

Notes to Chapter Four  •  2 4 5

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37

38

39 40

Shi Quan, “Guanggao xinlixue gailun.” Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, 237–39. Tao Xisheng, “Xijiu shangpin yü xinjiu funü.” Scott, Theory of Advertising; and Scott, Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising. He intended to become a missionary educator in China but ended up in Germany, where he studied applied psy­chol­ogy with Wilhelm Wundt, who also appealed to Japa­nese intellectuals and came into Chinese via Japa­nese translation. See finding aid, Walter Dill Scott (1969–1955) Papers, 1891–1977, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois, accessed March 22, 2021, https://­files​.­library​ .­northwestern​.­edu​/­findingaids​/­walter​_­d​_­scott​.­pdf; and Brisco, Economics of Efficiency. Huang Kewu, “Cong shenbao yiyao guanggao kan minchu Shanghai de yiliao wenhua yü shehui sheng­huo.” Barlow, “Buying In.” Placing teeth into a female figure’s mouth broke convention. Elite and popu­lar female images closed the mouth and did not expose teeth. Allen, War on Bugs. Shenbao, March 7, 1920; my emphasis. Professor Nanxiu Qian identified this figure for me. Grateful thanks. Sakamoto, “Manga Hyōjyō ni miru syanhai modangāru.” Isaka, Onnagata; Isaka, “Gender of Onnagata as the Imitating Imitated.” Isaka, “Gender of Onnagata”; Isaka, Onnagata. Barlow, “Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History.” In the 1912 image, a Manchurian-­garbed w ­ oman holds a ­bottle of washing powder printed with a lovely brand mark called the sobijin. The next image, also from 1912, shows an equally advanced begowned girl with a hair band, holding an advertising fan and staring at the product jars. Yeh, Shanghai Love. Also see Yeh, “Shanghai Leisure, Print Entertainment, and the Tabloids, Xiaobao”; Yeh, “Press and the Rise of Peking Opera Singer as National Star”; and McCloud, Understanding Comics. McCloud, Understanding Comics. Morishita Jintan, Morishita Jintan 80-­nenshi, 32; and Morishita Jintan, Sōgō hoken yaku Jintan kara sōgō hoken sangyō Jintan e, 28. Ms. Miho Matsumura, Institute for Global Studies at Hitotsubashi University, undertook the research into Jintan Corporation’s marketing policies with assistance from Patrick O’Dwyer. Morishita Jintan, Morishita Jintan 80-­nenshi, 56–60. Morishita’s Jintan Corporation pioneered newsprint advertising. Morishita created long-­running, pleasing print media advertising campaigns, to which he added ­music, billboards, balloons, cars, neon signs, and giveaway campaigns. Morishita Jintan, Sōgō hoken yaku Jintan kara sōgō hoken sangyō Jintan e, 52. According to Professor Chen Zu’en, Nakayama could not compete with American brands in Shanghai ­because of anti-­Japanese patriotic sentiment ­there. Even so, the ccc outstripped Eu­ro­pean, American, and Chinese cosmetic creams and soap companies. See Chen Zu’en, Shanghai ri qiao shehui shengshuo shi.

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41 Dentsu (in full, the Japan Advertising ­Limited and Telegraphic Ser­vice Com­ pany) reconsolidated in 1906 and consolidated once again in 1907, as the com­pany came increasingly to specialize in newsprint advertising. Between 1912 and 1926, “Chinese newspapers ­were refusing to run advertisements for Japa­nese products. However, the Shanghai branch of Dentsu, vanguard of Japa­nese capitalism, was applying pressure to vari­ous Chinese newspapers, and from January 1923 . . . ​­these [papers] started carry­ing Japa­nese advertising represented by Dentsu.” Nakase, “Development of the Advertising Industry.” 42 Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 14, 460–88. 43 Zhao Chen, Zhongguo jindai guanggao wenhua, 65–68. 44 Jintan ad, Dagongbao, 49. 45 Much has been written on the theme of “degenerance.” The funniest is Long, Zhongguo Jindai Sheying Yishu Meixue Wenxuan, ch. 3, section “Degenerance in Po­liti­cal Polemics.” 46 Moeran, “Newspapers, Advertising and the Japa­nese Economy.” This invaluable document rec­ords the chronological po­liti­cal economy of advertising agencies in Osaka and Tokyo from 1880. Yamamoto, Kōkoku no shakai shi, 190–94; and Yamamoto and Nishizawa, Nihon no kōkoku, 43–47. 47 Nakagawa conducted seminars on advertising theory at Kobe University, ­later joining the advertising agency Mannensha. He authored collections, books, and other documents, including Kōkoku to senden and Kōkokuron, and he launched Kōkoku ronsō (Essays on advertising), the nation’s first advertising research journal. See Yamamoto and Nishizawa, Nihon no kōkoku, 314–15. 48 Yamamoto and Nishizawa, Nihon no kōkoku, 308. Satō Uhei’s press, Satō Shuppanbu, as well as Jitsumu Sōshō Hakkōshō press published many volumes on advertising. 49 Scott, Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising, cited by Hiraoka, Jiyūjizai kōkoku-­ho; Hollingworth, Kōkoku to hanbai; and Poffenberger, Kōkoku shinrigaku. Scott’s book was republished by Sasaki Jūku in 1917 as Kōkoku shinrigaku, without crediting Scott. It was republished again by Sasaki Jūku in 1924 as Sukotto kōkoku shinrigaku. Scott’s The Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising in Theory and Practice, a revised version of the 1908 edition supplemented by Scott, was translated into Japa­nese in 1921, and Matsumiya Saburō produced Kōkoku shinrigaku in 1939. See also Yamamoto and Tsuganezawa, Nihon no kōkoku, 312–13. 50 Quoted in Yamamoto, Kōkoku no shakai shi. See also Hamada, Jitsuyō kōkoku-­hō. Historian Yamamoto Taketoshi considers this to be the inauguration of lit­er­a­ture advocating the social scientific study of advertising among Japa­nese intellectuals and advertisers. 51 See Eiji, Genealogy of “Japa­nese” Self-­Images; and a review of Eiji in Askew, “Melting Pot or Homogeneity?” 52 K. Suzuki, State and Racialization. 53 See Barlow, “Buying In,” for detailed analy­sis of the ad’s format, formulaic qualities, probable origin, and remarkable success.

Notes to Chapter Four  •  2 4 7

54 Bergère, Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie (1990). 55 Dagongbao 95, no. 761 (April 17, 1930). On love triangles and their popularity, see Ling Shiao, “Culture, Commerce, and Connections”; and Lung-­Kee Sun, Chinese National Character. 56 Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, n3, and 1, 462–63. “Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—­that is not archaic—­images. The image that is read—­which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—­bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.” 57 Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, n3, 2. 58 Monnais, Colonial Life of Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam. 59 The only reference to Vagitoran that I can find occurs in Japanese-­English Medical Dictionary in a long “List of Japa­nese Drugs.” 60 See YS, “Renshenqi zhong funü yingzhi zhi changzhi jiqi weisheng.” 61 Robinson, “Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi.” 62 Yi, Liu, and Gan, Lao Shanghai guanggao; and Song, Lao yuefenpai. 63 Norris, Badiou’s “Being and Event,” 32–33. This paragraph reiterates the points that Peter Hallward makes in Badiou: A Subject to Truth (114–15). Badiou asserts that ­human voluntarism flings itself beyond given ontological conditions and then continues engaging the ambiguous and as yet unproven, ­until it, too, becomes the known or is left ­behind. 64 Tsin, “Imagining ‘Society’ in Early Twentieth-­Century China,” 213. See also Tsin, Nation, Governance and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927.

Chapter 5: Nakedness and Interiority 1 Marx, “Estranged ­Labor.” I gratefully acknowledge Martin J. Powers’s contributions to this chapter and Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang’s Companion to Chinese Art. 2 Print technologies and new media genres in the last half of the nineteenth ­century have been amply researched. See Mittler, “Between Discourse and Social Real­ity.” The pioneers in this area are Xiaoqing Ye, Andrea Janku, Natascha Vittinghoff, Kai-­Wing Chow, and particularly Christopher Reed. 3 Welland, Experimental Beijing. 4 Teo, “Modernism and Orientalism.” 5 Kuiyi Shen has drawn a line between the commercial arts that emerged in the 1880s and the specific genealogy of formulaic drawn commercial art. See K. Shen, “Lianhuanhua and Manhua.” 6 Lu Cheng, “Meishu geming,” 85, cited in M. Huang, “Spectacle of Repre­sen­ta­tion.” 7 Tsai, “Having it All,” 133. 8 Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan. 9 Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 168. 10 Lang wrote, “When foreigners visited China, they often went to the street corners to photo­graph t­ hose disgraceful scenes [opium smoking, gambling, foot binding,

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•  Notes to Chapter Four

e­ tc.]. In the course of time this would create a wrong impression: ­people in the foreign countries would believe that ­these images show the real Chinese community. Our objective [as art photog­raphers] was to publicize the beautiful views of China and hence correct ­those mistaken views. At that time we did not ­really care ­whether our works would be selected, we just sent our photo­graphs whenever we heard of the news of the exhibitions.” Quoted in Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 171. 11 Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 212. 12 Lai quotes Lang: “I have furthermore discovered that ­here, once and for all, photography has approached the technique of Chinese painting. Have not Chinese artists been making composite pictures all the time?” Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 167; my emphasis. 13 Reed, “Hybrid China.” Reed hypothesizes what early photog­raphers found significant. In “Transferring the Image: The Ac­cep­tance of Photography in China,” Frances Terpak and Jeff Cody consider how and why photography was readily taken up in China. 14 Tian, Chinese Dialectics, 78. 15 Z. Gao, “Emergence of Modern Psy­chol­ogy in China.” 16 Lin, Peking University. 17 Quoted in Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 216; my emphasis. From Liu Bannong, preface, reprinted in Long, Zhongguo jindai sheying yishu meixue wenxuan, 208–9. Lang quoted this passage in one form or another in at least four of his essays. Lang also drew on Six Canons of Xie He (500–535), arguing that 1,400 years ­earlier, Chinese paint­ers had discovered the aesthetic structure that he rediscovered in composite darkroom technologies. 18 Lai notes that Lang’s guohua (brush painting) work is coarse and pedestrian and was often compared to the inferior paintings of Ma Yuan, active in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and Ma Lin, active in the mid-­thirteenth ­century. Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 291. Once Lai established his formula, his images became formulaic. 19 Lai, Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan, 427. 20 Cahill, “Beauty’s Face in ­Later Chinese Painting.” 21 Naked eugenics sexy girl dances with sponge board (advertisement), Funü yuebao 2, no. 9 (October 10, 1936). 22 Brennan, History, 184. 23 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 2. 24 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 29. Inaesthetics, this clever term for insisting that we ask art about truth, is part of Badiou’s well-­known four-­part schema of science, politics, art, and love. As a phi­los­o­pher, Badiou takes the position that “art is a thought in which artworks are the Real (and not the effect). And this thought, or rather the truths that it activates are irreducible to other truths—be they scientific, po­liti­cal, or amorous” (9). Art possesses the two characteristics of immanence and singularity as well. To operate its own truth procedure, art is

Notes to Chapter Five  •  2 4 9

“rigorously coextensive with the truths that it generates” and therefore singular, in the sense that “­these truths are given nowhere ­else than in art” (29). 25 Lair, Advertising Pro­gress. 26 See Barlow, “What Is Wanting?”; and ­Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-­Century China. 27 Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory.” 28 My example is the ad campaign for Cutex hand-­care products, analyzed in Barlow, “Buying In.” Also see Hodsdon, “Mystique of Mise-­en-­Scène Revisited.” 29 Rocha, “Quentin Pan 潘光旦 in The China Critic.” 30 Spivak, “Echo,” 32; my emphasis 31 Brennan, Interpretation of the Flesh, 161–63. Par­tic­u­lar thanks to Timothy Murray, who engaged me on my use of Brennan’s work, informing me that Brennan had written her major work at Cornell, and to Arnika Fuhrmann, who invited me to pre­sent about this book in the first instance. 32 Both Gad C. Issy’s The Philosophy of the View of Life in Modern Chinese Thought and Laurence Schneider’s Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-­Century China modified Daniel Kwok’s 1965 classic Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950. 33 ­There are three feminist studies of this history: Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers; Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the ­Woman Writer in Late Imperial China”; and J. Zhang, Psychoanalysis in China, particularly ch. 5. I am grateful, as always, for the late Jingyuan Zhang’s astute, learned, and pathbreaking work. 34 Pan, “Feng Xiaoqing kao,” 24. 35 Pan, “Feng Xiaoqing kao,” 25. 36 Ellen Widmer lists two more from the 1930s: Pan, “Xiaoqing kaozheng bulu”; and Pan, “Shu Feng Xiaoqing quanji hou.” The 1927 version is longer ­because a Xiaoqing scholar, Yu Xiangyuan, had given Pan more historical evidence. See Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy.” For a more recent discussion of ­women paint­ers who referenced Xiaoqing to express themselves, also see Wang Yuanfei, “Emaciated Soul.” 37 Adapted from Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction. Diane Elam argues that ­woman was itself a “ms en abyme.” In feminist repre­sen­ta­tion, that would mean that “­women” is always ­going to be an unstable signifier for an indefinable linguistic attempt to be “­woman.” While I learned a lot from Elam, I suggest that in commodity-­woman commercial ephemera, the relation being struck is not textual but graphic and, the mirroring of two unlike qualities—­commodity and female— is an infinite regress in which they define one another. ­Every ad of a commodity ­woman appreciating herself in a mirror sets up this mise en abyme. 38 J. Zhang, Psychoanalysis in China, 135. 39 Brennan, Interpretation of the Flesh, 167–68; my emphasis. 40 J. Zhang, Psychoanalysis in China, 135. 41 See Laing, Selling Happiness. 42 See Ye Weili, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name, for a helpful capsule biography of Pan, who was also educated at Columbia University and like C. P. Ling was a Boxer Indemnity scholar. 250 

•  Notes to Chapter Five

43 See Tani Barlow, “Commercial Advertising Art in 1840s–1940s China,” 457, 469. 44 Joan Judge has reproduced a number of ­these images in her Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press. 45 Thanks to Judith Zeitlin for providing the image and to Christine Tan for calling my attention to it in the first case. 46 For a summary analy­sis of ­women in Chinese painting, see Cahill, “Beauty’s Face in ­Later Chinese Painting.” 47 T. Lu, Persons, Roles, and Minds, ch. 1. 48 Text translation is from Haun Saussey, who believes the reference is to a popu­lar Cantonese opera score. ­Others are currently studying the text and have other interpretations. I am grateful for Saussey’s translation, which is better than mine. Permission to cite granted by Haun Saussey, letter to author, April 8, 2010. 49 Athanasius Kircher’s China Monumentis (1667) includes an image of a young female literatus but she too looks away from the artist and the viewer. 50 Badiou, Being and Event, 24: “Let’s fix the terminology: I term situation [as] any presented multiplicity. Granted the effectiveness of the pre­sen­ta­tion, a situation is the place of taking-­place, what­ever the terms of the multiplicity in question. ­Every situation admits its own par­tic­u­lar operator of the count-­as-­one. This is the most general definition of a structure; it is what prescribes, for a presented multiple, the regime of its count-­as-­one. When anything is counted as one in a situation, all this means is that it belongs to the situation in the mode par­tic­ul­ ar to the effects of the situation’s structure.

51

52 53

54 55

In Badiou’s approach to the event, set theory is integral. ­Because he is arguing that ontology is mathematical, his concepts—­the logic of the situation, the eventual site, the name, the retrospectively denominated event as such—­are all figured in relation to superfluity or void. Simply put, a rupture of conventional drawings of female mimesis (­women who draw themselves), that is, the inclusion of a commodity, changes every­thing. The commodity’s pre­sen­ta­tion may have occurred in the seductive vio­lence of corporate imperialism, but ­here we see an art beholden to a new situation in which an artist refers to canonical female mimesis but rethinks it as a new situation. Sophisticated rhe­toric and a robust game culture of erotic play among courtesans and clients are well documented from the seventeenth ­century on. See Lowry, “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling.” The obvious example for such an argument would be the classic sexual morality tale by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, Jinpingmei. Pan incorrectly cites U.S. psychoanalyst Trigant Burrow’s 1917 essay, “The Genesis and Meaning of ‘Homo­sexuality’ and Its Relation to the Prob­lem of Introverted ­Mental States.” Xu Junjie, Zhongguo guanggao shi, 122, 140; Barlow, “ ‘ What Is a Poem?’ ” Formulated in Helmling, “Constellation and Critique.” Notes to Chapter Five  •  2 5 1

56 In Asian studies this concept is familiar from the work of Naoki Sakai’s “co-­ configuration,” a transference relation in which one’s “own” relation is thinkable only ­because language always includes the desire to see one’s self as a foreigner would see one, object-­like. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 59–60. 57 Tan, Exposition of Benevolence, 85. 58 Spivak, “Echo,” 20; my emphasis. 59 Bensaïd, “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event,” 95–96. 60 Mann, “ ‘Fuxue.’ ” Scholars publishing regularly in the Leiden-­based specialist journal Nan Nü, founded in 1997, and in monographs in many languages have revealed cloistered, wealthy, and literate ­women’s lives and have interpreted writing by male literati about their relationships with female kin. 61 Bray, Technology and Gender. 62 Barlow, Question of ­Women in Chinese Feminism, ch. 3. 63 Leutner and Spakowski, ­Women in China. Also see Judge, Republican Lens. 64 Young, “Policing the Modern ­Woman,” 132–33. 65 Zito and Barlow, Body, Subject, and Power in China, 18. 66 S. Zhang, “Shaping the New ­Woman,” 405. 67 P. Huang, Code, Custom, and ­Legal Practice in China. 68 Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution. 69 Barlow, “Politics and Protocols of Funü.”

Chapter 6: Wang Guangmei’s Qipao 1 According to Tang Shaojie’s research, Kuai Dafu put Wang Guangmei on trial with the cooperation of the Central Committee and the Beijing P ­ eople’s Liberation Army garrison. See Tang Shaojie, Yi ye zhi qiu, 51–53. See also MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 523n35. Elizabeth Perry’s eloquent description, “The 1960s: Wang Guangmei and Peach Garden Experience,” implies that Wang Guangmei reluctantly carried out Liu Shaoqi’s ­orders but had no personal agenda. Also see a more recent Tang essay regarding the sequence of the trial. Tang Shaojie, “Qinghua daxue ‘wenhua da geming de shou kuangbiao qu.” 2 Barlow, “Semifeudalism, Semicolonialism.” ­Those who argue that Wang was a proxy for Liu Shaoqi are correct. 3 Hortense Spillers and Chris Connery, eds., “The Sixties and the World Event,” special issue of boundary 2 36, no. 1 (2009). 4 Barlow, “Politics and Protocols of Funü”; and Russo, “ ‘Probable Defeat.’ ” 5 Drucker, Graphesis, 15–16. Assuming that Johanna Druker’s argument, the strug­gle session—­and its accoutrements of the dunce cap for “hatting” class enemies, the body cangue (a wooden penal yoke), costumes, and accusatory posters—­ graphically and performatively created meaning. 6 Spakowski, “Socialist Feminism in Post-­socialist China.” 7 Zhou Yuan, Xinbian hongweibing ziliao, vol. 8.

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8 Zhou Yuan, Xinbian hongweibing ziliao, vol. 8. 9 See, for instance, the long-­running series of articles in April 1967, “Liuxiu waizhuan.” See Qinghua daxue jinggangshan bingtuan/baoshihua zhandou zu, Liuxiu waizhuan. In other words, the newspaper’s primary target was always Liu. 10 Aminda Smith makes the point regarding the stakes of strug­gle fully and with ­great sophistication in her “Maoist Epistemology.” 11 Hinton, Hundred Day War, 101–5. Also see Tang Shaojie, Yi ye zhi, qiu 13–15n3, for a confirmation that Hinton’s viewpoint reflected ­Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution perspectives. 12 J. Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War, 242–43. 13 This section draws inspiration from Russo, “ ‘Probable Defeat.’ ” 14 Barlow, “Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History.” See Liu Tao, “Zao Liu Shaoqi de fan, genzhe Mao zhuxi gan yibeizi geming”; Ye Lin, “Wang Guangmei shi Liu Shaoqi pai de guizishou”; and Qinghua daxue jinggangshan bao bianjibu, “Dou Wang Guangmei te kan.” Heightening the dramatic situation, stepdaughter Liu Tao repudiated her ­father and Wang in the December 31, 1966, issue of Jinggangshan News with an accompanying critique of Wang provided by Ye Lin, a former leader of the Qinghua University work team. Liu Tao, “Zao Liu Shaoqi de fan, genzhe Mao zhuxi gan yibeizi geming.” 15 “Qinghuayuan sanshen Wang Guangmei: Qiangpo chuanqi Yinni fuzhuang xixiao numa jinqing wuru” (page unknown; the University of Washington copy is a clipped and mounted version of the newspaper article and does not include pagination); and “­Trials of Wang Kuang-­mei.” The transcript appeared in Chinese in early May 1968 in the Taiwanese journal Xingdao and in En­glish a week ­earlier in the U.S. consulate’s Hong Kong listening post’s briefing document, Current Background. I am grateful to Michael Meng, librarian for Chinese studies, East Asia Library, Yale University, for his help in locating the Chinese text and guiding me through the morass of Cultural Revolution materials. It is difficult to say how much noncombatants knew. Certainly, contemporaries appeared to enjoy reading the ­great character posters, and they copied them into revolutionary notebooks. 16 Chao, Wenhua da geming cidian, 54. 17 This tone resonates with interviews she gave a year before her death in October 2006. See “Mei ri fu gao.” 18 “­Trials of Wang Kuang-­mei,” 3. 19 Hongdaihui Beijing gongnongbing tiyuan Mao Zedong sixiang bingtuan xuanchuanzu, Liushi fufu milan de sheng­huo chou’e de linghun; and Qinghua daxue jinggangshan bingtuan, Sikai Wangguangmei de huapi. I gratefully acknowledge the kindness of Nancy Hearst, Harvard University, Fairbank Center librarian, and Michael Meng in securing copies of ­these rare documents. 20 Hongdaihui Beijing gongnongbing tiyuan Mao Zedong sixiang bingtuan xuan­ chuanzu, Liushi fufu milan de sheng­huo chou’e de linghun, 1–5. 21 For an excellent account of ­these events, see Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder. I am grateful to Laurie Sears for her background lectures and recommendation of this book.

Notes to Chapter Six  •  2 5 3

22 Hongdaihui Beijing gongnongbing tiyuan Mao Zedong sixiang bingtuan xuanchuan, Liushi fufu milan de sheng­huo chou’e de linghun, 3. 23 The acronym nasakom is based on the Indonesian words for “nationalism,” “religion,” and “Communism.” 24 “­Trials of Wang Kuang-­mei,” 7. 25 Huang Zheng, Zhibi: Wang Guangmei fangtanlu. 26 Huang Zheng, Zhibi: Wang Guangmei fangtanlu, 308. 27 Included in Huang’s transcripts are individual chapters on Wang’s diplomatic missions with Liu to Pakistan in 1966, missions to Burma, and photo­graphs of Wang wearing the Hong Kong tailored qipao that Kuai’s group had used to indict her. 28 Shao, Zhou Enlai and the Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy, 212–37. 29 The accusation that Wang and Liu had a separate policy imperative is easily disproved. The Indonesian Communist Party and Sukarno’s unity government ­were part of the ­People’s Republic of China’s overall pursuit of the “­people’s war” strategy to decolonize Asia and the nonaligned African countries. This is further suggested by Subandrio’s trips to consult Mao Zedong, China’s explicit support of Sukarno’s push against British neo-­imperialism, Aidit’s and other Indonesian Communist Party officials’ visits to China, and the Mao-­style land-­revolution proposals that Aidit advocated in mid-1965, which led to panic among Indonesia’s military oligarchs. Also, Sukarno gave a speech on August 17, 1965, supporting a Maoist-­style arming of ­people’s militias, and on returning from Beijing that same day, Aidit called for arming workers and peasants. Liu Shaoqi’s policy was no dif­ fer­ent from the general position of the CCP (foreign policy is made by the party, not the state) on ­people’s wars in Asia. 30 Bensaïd, “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event,” 99. 31 Badiou, Saint Paul. 32 I wrote this section ­under the influence of a joint proj­ect, Reconsidering Communist Feminism, in two workshops. The first occurred at Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies on March 23, 2012, and the second at Bowdoin College on September 28–30, 2012. The participants ­were Maria Bucur-­Deckard, Suzy Kim, Kristin Ghodsee, and Anna Krylova. An impor­tant book on redeeming socialist feminism is Dong, Xinbie yujing yu shuxie de zhengzhi. Suzy Kim’s edited issue of positions: asia critique on “Cold War Feminisms in East Asia,” 28, no. 3 (2020) is the fruit of ­those discussions. 33 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 35–39. 34 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 1–2. 35 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 45. 36 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 40. 37 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 43. 38 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 46. 39 Jiang Qing, Collected Works, 152–69. 40 Xiaomei Chen, Reading the Right Text, 1–63.

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41 Qinghua daxue jinggangshan bingtuan, Sikai Wangguangmei de huapi. 42 Qinghua daxue jinggangshan bingtuan, Sikai Wangguangmei de huapi, 11. 43 Iconographically and ideologically, Jiang Qing would pioneer an alternative per­for­mance. See Chao, Wenhua da geming cidian, 63. This entry concerns Jiang Qing’s proposal in 1974 to mandate a standard skirt in a ­simple, proletarian style, so that all ­women could use the same model. 44 This is the feminine per­for­mance that so concerned the Red Guard and Kuai that they forced her to put on the Indonesia-­trip garment for a photo­graph even though during the mass strug­gle session she appeared in a garment that covered her dress, festooned with the famous necklace of gold Ping-­Pong balls. 45 On the origins of the qipao, see Finnane, Changing Clothes in China, ch. 6, “Qipao China,” 139–76. 46 Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution. I am paraphrasing Hallward, Badiou, 120. Badiou’s words are: “It is only through this discovery that ­there irrupts a gap between what is counted as one in a situation and the intrinsic one that the ele­ment is. Retroactively, we ­will have to declare that this something which appears, eventally, as needing to be counted, did indeed belong to the situation.” Badiou, Abrégé de métapolitique, 83. In this regard, a moving instance of this prob­ lem, the natu­ral rights of the subaltern ­woman, is Ding Ling’s late polemic, “Du Wanxiang.” 47 In other words, Wang did not qualify as a ­woman ­under this construction. 48 Hallward, Badiou, 122. 49 Dazibao xuan [Selected big-­character posters], no. 6 (?) [cover missing] ( July 1966). 50 See Ip, “Fashioning Appearances”; Tina Chen, “Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao’s China”; and Roberts, “Positive ­Women Characters in the Model Revolutionary Works of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” 51 Echols, Daring to Be Bad.

Conclusion 1 See H. Peng, Dandyism and Transcultural Modernity; Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Lit­er­a­ture. See Bevan, Modern Miscellany, for the history of Miss Ing Tang. 2 Quoted in Auerbach, “Imagine No Meta­phors”; my emphasis. For a discussion of the mutilated ­woman revolutionary corpse and the mutilated Japa­nese ­woman corpse, see Barlow, “How Chinese Are You?” 3 Elman, “Failures of Con­temporary Chinese Intellectual History.” 4 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 316: “Freud used this term to describe (among other ­things) the re-­presentation of the dream-­thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images (displacement/ Verschiebung-­Verstellung). Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of

Notes to Conclusion  •  2 5 5

the contradictions in each practice (q.v.) constituting the social formation (q.v.) on the social formation as a ­whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-­antagonism of the contradictions in the structure in dominance (q.v.) at any given historical moment. More precisely, the overdetermination”; my emphasis. 5 Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Lit­er­a­ture, 6. For discussions of the significance of the huabao, or pictorials, see Henriot and Yeh, Visualising China. 6 See Yang Kai, “Mao Zedong yu Zhao Wuzhen shijian,” for more detailed information about the suicide and how Mao understood and analyzed it. 7 Hallward, Badiou. I am paraphrasing this exposition of “the event” showing how this worked ­under the historical conditions concerning me ­here. 8 I am grateful to Andrew Liu for sharing his unpublished work on the figure Y.D. with me. See Liu, “­Woman Question and the Agrarian Question.” 9 Zupančič, “Fifth Condition.” 10 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 14. 11 Badiou, Infinite Thought, 169–93. Badiou has clarified what he means by “our times” in Logics of Worlds. 12 Badiou, “Question of Being ­Today,” 43. 13 Badiou, “Question of Being ­Today,” 43. 14 Badiou, ­Century, 72. 15 Badiou, ­Century, 72–73. 16 Badiou, ­Century, 1. 17 Badiou, ­Century, 13. 18 Badiou, Conditions, 68. 19 Badiou, ­Century, 49. 20 Barlow, “ ‘ What Is a Poem?’ ” 21 Žižek, Slavoj, “Psychoanalysis in Post-­Marxism,” 245. 22 Žižek, Slavoj, “Psychoanalysis in Post-­Marxism,” 257. 23 Antagonism, in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s sense, is “a relation wherein the limits of everyday objectivity are shown—in the sense in which Wittgenstein used to say that what cannot be said can be shown. [Since] the social only exists as a partial effort for constructing society . . . ​antagonism, as a witness of the impossibility of a final suture, is the ‘experience’ of the limit of the social. Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself.” Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 125. For a discussion of Žižek’s theories of ­women, see the conclusion to Barlow, Question of ­Women. 24 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 24, 28. 25 Badiou, ­Century, 108. 26 Remaining in the “immanent method established at the very start of this series” of characterizations of the twentieth c­ entury, Badiou continues to resolve all immanency of femininity or ­women as subjects into love: “­Women climb onto the stage of love just as the masses had climbed upon that of History,” or time, “[Andre]

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Breton’s formula for the devastated ­women,” fatigued from throwing herself constantly into the abyss or participating in waves of civil rights claims for a subject that historically has only a body and never a subjectivity. Badiou, ­Century, 145. 27 Badiou, ­Century, 3. 28 Toscano, addendum, 201. 29 This is an indirect reference to Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge,” 460.

Notes to Conclusion  •  2 5 7

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Index

Acting (Boleslavsky), 213 “Adam Schaff ” (Petrillio and Ponzio), 241n1 advertising. See also capitalism; commodities: about Chinese, 11–17, 246n38, 247n41, 247n47; and commercial ephemera, 16, 123–61; and the event of ­women, 17, 60–62, 67–70, 210–11, 216, 224, 227–29, 246n26; and industrial ­commodities, 19–22, 25–33; and nakedness and interiority, 17, 163–82; and sociology, 71–72, 100–103, 107–13, 122; and story ads, 150–55, 169–70, 199, 212; and trade in China, 15, 19–62 Advertising Campaigns (French, Tipper), 134 Advertising Club of China, 133 aesthetics, Kantian, 74, 164, 168, 238n7 ­After Eunuchs (Chiang), 232n20, 238n1 Aidit, D. N., 205, 208, 215, 254n29 Ajinomoto, 107, 147f4.24, 149 Althusser, Louis, 12, 100, 241n1, 255n4 amco: about, 23–25, 28–35, 52, 55–58, 61, 67–69, 233n1, 234n6, 234n10; advertisements, 19–20, 24–28, 33–38, 50f1.45, 127, 131, 150 “An Analy­sis of Xiaoqing” (Pan), 172 anarchism, 67–70, 98–99, 121, 186. See also He-­ Yin Zhen Andersen, I., 29 Andersen, Meyer & Com­pany, ­Limited, 19, 233n1 animal-­instinct theory. See instinct Ariga Nagao, 16, 102, 107–10, 242n20, 242n23 art. See advertising; graphics and images; high art; low art Bachofen, Johann50–Jakob, 87, 96 Bacon, Francis, 80 Badiou (Hallward), 248n63 Badiou, Alain: about the philosophy of, 232n20, 232nn16–17, 248n63, 249n24, 255n46; and art and aesthetics, 180–82; and commercial ephemera, 16, 124, 168; and the event of ­women, 7–12, 64, 225–30, 251n50, 256n26 Bai Di, 193

Balzac, Honoré de, 86 Banking and Prices in China (Edkins), 58 bat: about, 23, 34, 39–42, 55–56, 132; and advertising, 20, 22f1.6, 38, 50–54, 71, 151, 236n42 Bebel, August, 72, 79–81, 87–89 Beiyang huabao (publication), 220–24, 227 Beneden, Edouard Van, 90 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 13, 61–62, 69, 124–25, 181–82, 222 Bensaïd, Daniel, 12 Bergson, Henri, 115 Betta, Chiara, 35 Bickers, Robert, 34–35 Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-­Century China (Schneider), 233n26 Black, J. Ernest, 123–24 Blumenbach, J. F., 112 Boleslavsky, Richard, 213 Bove, Arianna, 8 Bramsen, Christopher Bo, 234n10 branding, 20, 35, 43–45, 60, 67, 100. See also advertising Bray, Francesca, 101, 184 Brecht, Bertolt, 227 Brennan, Teresa, 167, 173 Breton, Andre, 256n26 Brisco, Norris Arthur, 148 British American Tobacco (bat). See bat Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold, 75 Brown, Frederick, 33 Brown, Rajeswary Ampalavanar, 39 Brunner, Mond & Co Ltd., 38–42, 45–47 Bukharin, Nikolai, 12, 85, 92 Bunding, 34–35, 37f1.33 Bunnell, Peter C., 163 Cai Hesheng, 187 Cai Yuanpei, 164 capitalism. See also advertising; commodities; finance capital: about, 11, 55–59, 100–102, 237n51; and advertising, 134, 247n41; and

capitalism (continued) commercial ephemera, 127, 133–35, 160; communism and, 1, 191–93, 199–201; and the event of ­women, 61–66, 69, 133, 160, 222, 228–29; and trade and China, 13–14, 33–35, 39, 45, 55–59, 67, 234n7 Carpenter, Edward, 89, 239n19 ccc, 59, 127, 134, 141–44, 246n40 ccp, 1, 39, 84, 187–89, 192–94, 199–208, 214–15, 223, 231n1. See also communism Celan, Paul, 232n16 The ­Century (Badiou), 227–29, 232n16 Chen, C. J., 125, 244n10 Chen, Tina Mai, 218 Chen Dingmou, 114 Chen Duxiu, 163 Cheng Fangwu, 104 Cheng Yichou, 238n77 Chen Han-­seng, 12, 97 Chen Tiejian, 87 Chen Zu’en, 246n40 Chester, Richard, 127 Chiang, Howard, 232n20, 238n1 Chiang Kai-­shek, 39, 187, 195 Chiang, Yung-­Chen 73 China Monumentis (Kircher), 251n49 Chinese Commercial Advertising Agency, 127–28 Chinese Communist Party (ccp), 1, 39, 84, 187–89, 192–94, 199–208, 214–15, 223, 231n1. See also communism; Mao Zedong Chollot, J. J., 127 Chu-­yuan Cheng, 29 class: and communism, 187, 191–96, 200–206, 212–18, 252n5; and consumption, 59, 135, 140, 146, 153; and the event of ­women, 4–6, 14, 65–69, 183–89, 222, 225, 228; and sociology, 74–76, 84, 87–88, 94–98; and vernacular sociology, 101–2, 110–11, 120–21 Claudel, Paul, 227 Club Cosmetics Com­pany (ccc), 59, 127, 134, 141–44, 246n40 Coble, Parks, 39 Cochran, Sherman, 38–39 Cohen, Paul, 8, 232n16 Cold War, 208–9 Colgate, 24f1.9, 50f1.47, 59, 137, 160, 174–81 Collected Work ( Jiang), 211 colonialism. See corporate imperialism; imperialism commercial art. See advertising; graphics and images 284 

• Index

commodities. See also advertising; capitalism: and commercial ephemera, 123–61, 250n37; communism and interiority and, 191, 200, 211–18; and the event of ­women, 3, 16, 66, 69–70, 190, 220–21, 225, 230, 251n50; nakedness and interiority and, 162–63, 167–82; and trade in China, 11, 15, 19–62; and vernacular sociology, 16, 100–103, 107–8, 114. See also ephemera commodity fetishism, 191, 211, 222 “Common psy­chol­ogy, translating instinct” (Cheng), 114 communism, 1–2, 78, 187–219, 230, 255nn43–44. See also Chinese Communist Party (ccp); Maoism Comte, Auguste, 239n13 Copernicus, 89 copyright and trademark, 29, 44–47 corporate imperialism. See also imperialism; treaty-­ports: advertising and commodities and, 140–41, 144, 160, 182, 251n50; and the Chinese market, 15, 19, 23–25, 29, 34–52, 55, 60–61, 67–68; and the event of ­women, 3–4, 210, 222, 229; and social science, 72, 100 Cox, Howard, 50–53 C. P. Ling Com­pany, 59, 128 Crow, Carl, 59, 127–28, 131–32, 137, 160 Cultural Revolution, 1, 183, 191–92, 195, 199–204, 211, 214, 218, 223, 226 Cultural Revolution Group, 1, 204 Cutex, 23–24, 34, 150–54, 160 Cyclopaedia (Rees), 75 Dagongbao (newspaper), 151 Darwin, Charles, 3, 13, 77–79, 89–90, 103–5, 119 Darwinism, 79, 89, 104, 114, 122 David Sassoon and Com­pany, 23 Debates of ­Women (journal), 86 Deborin, Abram, 85, 92 De­cadent Life (Zhu), 205 de Certeau, Michel, 13 Deleuze, Gilles, 8–9 Derrida, Jacques, 237n68 Descartes, René, 81 devolution, 75, 87, 94, 110, 119–21, 150–55 dialectics, 61, 102, 124–25, 158–60, 164, 181, 222, 248n56 Dialectics of Nature (Engels), 92 Dianshizhai huabao (publication), 43 Ding Ling, 160, 163, 212 Ding Song, 126, 129–30, 133, 174, 178f5.9 Dittmer, Clarence G., 73

Dolezelova-­Velingerova, Milena, 76 A Doll’s House (Ibsen), 211 Dongfang zazhi (magazine), 174 Dong Limin, 193 Drucker, Johanna, 13, 233n23, 252n5 Duan Qiriu, 39 Durkheim, Émile, 111 Eastern Miscellany, 150, 236n35 Echols, Alice, 218 “Economic Revolution and ­Women’s Revolution” (He-­Yin), 237n73 Economics of Efficiency (Brisco), 148 Edkins, J. D., 58, 69 Elam, Diane, 250n37 electrification, 23, 28, 31–37, 51f1.48. See also General Electric (ge) Ele­ments of Psy­chol­ogy (Philips), 114 Ellis, Havelock, 81–82, 89 Ellwood, Charles A., 72, 83, 93–94, 120–21 Elman, Benjamin A., 222, 225 Elshakry, Marwa, 240n23 Enčmen, Emmanuel Semënovic, 92 An Encyclopaedia of Geography (Murray), 75 Endo Ryukichi, 110–12 Engels, Friedrich, 79–81, 86–87, 92, 96, 239n21 ephemera: Chinese markets and c­ ommercial, 15–19, 22, 36–38, 45, 55–58, 62, 69, 223; the event of ­women and commercial, 13, 210–11, 222–24, 227–29, 250n37; nakedness and interiority and commercial, 163, 168–69, 172, 181, 189; the social life of commercial, 16, 102, 123–61, 245n12, 250n37. See also commodities Etemad, Bouda, 33 eugenic theory: interiority and, 17, 190; and sexual se­lection, 16, 38, 77, 101, 110–22, 240n22; ­women and advertising and, 38, 146, 156–59, 165–66 events, 6–12, 135, 159, 182, 223, 251n50. See also ­women evolution: advertising and stories about, 34, 50, 123, 143, 150, 154; and the event of ­women, 4–6, 63, 160, 210, 225–27; and female consciousness, 162, 173, 183; and physiology, 16, 63, 210, 240n22; and sociology, 15–16, 71, 74–83, 87–99, 154, 242n23; and vernacular sociology, 101–22 On Evolution (Yan), 104–5 Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 74, 104 “Evolution in the Vegetable Kingdom” (Ward), 75

“The Evolution of Divorce” (Wei), 117 The Evolution of Sex (Thompson), 118 ­ amily Regulation (Zhu), 54 F “Faming shi renlei de benneng” (Yan), 114–15 Fang Bao, 238n77 Fan Jichang, 104 Fanon, Frantz, 229 Fei Ying, 167f5.3 feminism. See also ­women: and communism, 193, 211–13, 218–19; and the event of ­women, 12–16, 55, 62–65, 228; and modern ­women, 172, 186, 189; and sociology, 83, 112–13 Feng Xiaoqing, 170–73, 176, 240n33 Feng Xiaoqing (Pan), 172 Feng Zikai, 163 feudalism, 16, 69, 172, 184, 213 “The Fifth Condition” (Zupančič), 232n20 finance capital, 11, 23–25, 29–31, 34–36, 39, 45, 55–61, 67, 234n7. See also capitalism Finance in China (Wagel), 57 Five Continents phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, 165–67, 174, 178 flit, 137–39, 174 Ford Motor Com­pany, 128, 138–40, 150 Foucault, Michel, 8, 12, 100, 232n16 French, George, 134 Freud, Sigmund, 77, 81, 162, 170–72, 180, 226, 232n16, 255n4 Funü shibao (journal), 185 Funü zazhi (journal), 23, 116–17, 138, 158, 171 Fu Sinian, 84 ­Gamble, Sidney D., 73, 98 Gang of Four, 1, 204 Gao Junzhe, 119 Gao Xian, 115–16 Gardella, Robert, 39 Garke, Emile, 25 ge. See General Electric (ge) Geddes, Patrick, 118 gender. See sexual difference; sexuality; ­women General Electric (ge). See also electrification: about, 233n1, 234n10; advertisements, 19–20, 23, 31–38, 51f1.48, 62, 69, 150, 172; and trade in China, 25, 28–34, 38, 56, 61, 234n6 Geng Jizhi, 83 Gerth, Karl, 39 Giddings, Franklin Henry, 71, 83 Gilmartin, Christina Kelley, 187 Ginsborg, Hannah, 238n7 Gish, Lillian, 220–22

Index  •  2 8 5

The Global Cigarette (Cox), 50 gold standard, 42, 57–58 Gong Yan, 81 “Goodbye to ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture” (Qu), 86 Gorki, Maxim, 212 Gove, Philip Babcock, 125 “The Grabbing Hand” (image), 196–99 La Grande Odalisque (Ingres), 163 graphics and images: about, 13–14, 233n23, 248n56, 249n24; and advertising and sociology, 102–3, 107–8, 112–13; and advertising and the Chinese market, 17–37, 40–54, 60–62, 68–69; and commercial ephemera, 123–60, 246n26; communism and femininity and, 191–93, 196–202, 206, 210–12; and the event of ­women, 13–14, 160, 210–12, 220–24, 227–30; and high art, 162, 168–74, 182, 223; and low art, 162, 168, 182; and nakedness and interiority, 162–83, 248n10, 249n18, 250n37, 251n50 ­Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. See Cultural Revolution Groose, Karl, 113–14 Gui Youguang, 238n77 Gu Meijun, 222 Guo Moruo, 104 Guo Renyuan, 113–15 Habit and Instinct (Morgan), 114 Haekel, Ernst, 81 Hallward, Peter, 248n63 Hamada Shirō, 149 Hardini, 199, 203f, 208 Harkness, Margaret, 86 Hausman, William J., 29–31, 36–38 Hayes, Edward C., 73 He Guimei, 193 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 81 Henriot, Christian, 234n9 Hertner, Peter, 29–31, 36–38 Hertwig, Oskar, 2 He-­Yin Zhen. See also anarchism: about the philosophy of, 16, 22, 55, 119, 151, 180, 237n73, 238n77, 239n13; and conditions for thinking about ­women, 61–74, 98, 116, 160–62, 172, 184, 225 high art, 162, 168–74, 182, 223 Hilferding, Rudolf, 13, 22, 29, 55–62, 69–71 History of Politics ( Jenks), 104 Hobson, Benjamin, 238n1 Hollingworth, Harry L., 149 Hongloumeng (Cao), 175

286 

• Index

Hooke, Robert, 185 Hopkins, Claude C., 169 Howland, Douglas, 77, 242n20 Howlett, Jonathan, 35 Huang Chujiu, 42, 127 Huang Zheng, 207, 254n27 Hu Boxiang, 164 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 74, 77–79, 104–5, 239n13 Ibsen, Henrik, 211–13 images. See graphics and images imperialism. See also corporate imperialism: and the event of ­women, 4, 14, 229; Japa­nese, 36, 67, 97, 103, 106, 109, 127, 144–45, 235n17; US, 207, 215; and vernacular sociology, 103–5, 109 individual ­will, 80, 94, 101–2, 109–12, 116–20, 135, 157, 160, 213 Indonesia, 201, 206–9 Indonesian Communist Party, 200, 205, 208, 254n29 industrial development, 19–22, 25–34 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 163 Ing Tang, 220–22 ­Inoue Tetsujiro, 107 Ip, Hung-­Yok, 218 instinct, 16–17, 59, 87, 93–95, 99–104, 109–10, 113–22, 183 interiority and nakedness, 17, 162–90 The Intermediate Sex (Carpenter), 239n19 “Invention is the instinct of humanity” (Yan), 114–15 Isaka, Maki 142 Iseka Jijurō, 148–49 Ishikawa Yoshihiro, 239n19 Issy, Gad C., 233n26 James, William, 114 Japan: and advertising, 137, 140–45, 148; and imperialism, 36, 67, 97, 103, 106, 109, 127, 144–45, 149, 235n17; and social science, 76–82, 91–92, 102–3, 106–9; and trade in China, 23, 36–42, 45–46, 60, 67 Jenks, Edward, 104, 238n77 Jevons, William Stanley, 104 Ji Zhaojin, 58 Jiang Qing, 1–3, 16–17, 69, 192–93, 199–204, 208–15, 222, 224, 255n43 Jian Yujie, 39 Jian Zhaonan, 39 Jinggangshan News, 196–98, 253n14

Jinggangshan Regiment, 1, 191–93, 201–5, 217 Jin Mingluan, 112 Jintan, 36–38, 61, 67–69, 127, 144–48, 158, 172, 246n38 Jin Xuechen, 127 Kaneko Kiichi, 66 Kang Youwei, 76, 182, 240n22, 244n55 Kant, Immanuel, 12, 81–82, 88, 238n7 Kantian aesthetics, 74, 238n7 Karl, Rebecca, 64 Kawakami Hajime, 12 Keller, Ulrich F., 163 Kent, Stacie, 35 Ke Shi, 118, 121 Khrushchev, Nikita, 199–200, 207 Kirby, William, 42 Kircher, Athanasius, 251n49 Knight, Nick, 92, 239n19, 241n39, 241n43 Ko, Dorothy, 64 Koch, Robert, 185 Köll, Elisabeth, 39 Kotoku Denjiro, 12 Kuai Dafu, 1–2, 193–205, 209–10, 215–18, 231n1, 252n1 Kulp, Robert, 73 Kung Hsiang-­hsi, 25, 29 Kwan, Man Bun, 40–42 Kwok, Danny Wynn Ye, 233n26 Lacan, Jacques, 232n17, 232n20 Laclau, Ernesto, 256n23 The Ladies’ Journal, 23, 116–17, 138, 158, 171 Lai, Edwin Kin-­keung, 249n18 Lam, Tong, 11 Lang Jingshan, 163–68, 172, 248n10, 249n12, 249nn17–18 Lang Shu, 163, 168–69 Lazarus, Sylvain, 232n16 Le Bon, Charles-­Marie Gustave, 83 Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 124 Lenin, Vladimir, 13, 22, 29, 55, 85 Leonard, Jane K., 39 Letourneau, Charles Jean Marie, 117 Lever ­Brothers, 126, 130f4.6, 174 Liang Qichao, 76, 80, 182 Liang Shiqiu, 84 Liangyou (magazine), 60 Liberation, Chinese, 92, 98 Liberation and Reform (journal), 86 On Liberty (Mills), 74, 77–79

Li Da: about the work of, 12, 16, 62, 154, 160, 225, 239n19, 241n39, 241n43; and sociology, 15, 71–74, 77, 80–82, 85–86, 89–99, 182; and vernacular sociology, 105, 118, 121 Li Gongpu, 174 ­limited liability companies (llcs): about, 19, 53, 59, 62; and trade in China, 23–25, 29, 36–39, 42, 134 Ling, C. P., 100, 127–28, 131, 134, 138, 144, 148 Ling Shiao, 104 Lin Yaohua, 98 Lin Zexu, 75 Li Shicen, 114–15, 121 Li Shipeng, 81 Liu Bannong, 164 Liu Shaoqi, 1, 195, 198–209, 216–18, 252nn1–2, 253n9, 253n14, 254n27, 254n29 Liu Tao, 198–200, 253n14 Li Zhensheng, 195f Li Zhuang, 150 Logics of Worlds (Badiou), 232n16 low art, 162, 168, 182 Lowe, Chuan-­hua Gershom, 60, 63 Lu Cheng, 163 Luciani, Jean, 33 Lu Meiseng, 127, 131 Luncheon on the Grass (Manet), 163 Lu Shoulun, 127 Luxemburg, Rosa, 22, 55 Lü Xinyu, 193 Lu Xun, 84–86, 104, 108, 115, 160, 163, 212 Lü Yunzhang, 185–86 Lyell, Charles, 90 Ma Junwu, 103 Ma Lin, 249n18 Manet, Édourd, 163 Mann, Susan, 184 Mao Dun, 212 Maoism, 89–92, 188–93, 201, 205, 214, 217–18, 226. See also communism Mao Zedong. See also Chinese Communist Party (ccp): about, 74, 85–86, 115, 199, 225; policies and governance of, 36, 188–89, 193, 196, 202–8, 241n39 Marchand, Roland, 47 Marriage Law, 188, 192 Marx, Karl, 12, 62, 86, 96, 162, 171 Marxism: about, 59, 77, 85, 102, 115, 189, 241n1; in China, 5, 241n39; and ­communism, 188, 192–93, 205; and the event of ­women,

Index  •  2 8 7

Marxism (continued) 160, 183, 224, 228; and interiority, 162, 171; and sociology and sexuality, 15–16, 71–72, 79–80, ­85–86, 90–92, 97–99, 105–6, 115, 119–22 “Marx, Engels and the Literary Realism” (Qu), 86 “The Material Basis of Life” (Wei), 117 materialism: dialectical, 80, 85, 91; historical, 8, 61, 83, 93–94, 115, 125, 181; and sociology, 90–96, 111, 115, 122, 167 materiality: and commodities, 56, 62, 133, 167; communism and femininity and, 210–12; and the event of ­women, 11–14 matriarchy, 15–16, 87, 96, 99, 121 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis, 2 May Fourth Movement, 15, 101–3, 107, 110, 115–17, 122, 151, 162, 183 Ma Yuan, 249n18 McClennan, John Ferguson, 96 McDougall, William, 114 McElderry, Andrea, 39 Meiji Restoration, 76, 106 Mei Lanfang, 141–43, 146f4.21 Meillassoux, Quentin, 64 Mendel, Gregor, 2 Metzler, Mark, 42 Meyer, Vilhelm, 23–25, 56, 69–71, 100, 233n1, 234n6, 234n10 Miescher, Johannes Friedrich, 231n5 Mill, John Stuart, 74, 77–81, 88, 104, 239n13 mimesis: and nakedness and interiority, 177, 182, 251n50; and sociology, 15–16, 72, 80, 83–86, 96; and vernacular sociology, 100, 106, 121 Minakata Kumagusu, 242n21 Minduo (journal), 115 Min’guo ribao (publication), 175 Mitin, Mark Borisovich, 85, 92 Mitsunga Hoshiro, 144, 148 modernity: and advertising and trade in China, 22, 29, 34–39, 43–55, 59–62, 234n12; and art, 162–65, 168, 223; and commercial ephemera, 124–26, 133–35, 138–46, 149–62, 202; and communism and femininity, 193, 209–17; and the event of ­women, 7–11, 63, 69, 143, 172, 209–17, 220–30, 232n17; and nakedness and interiority, 17, 162–65, 168–72, 182–90; and sociology, 5, 16, 71, 74–76, 79, 87; and vernacular sociology, 101–10, 113, 117–19 Modern Sociology (Endo), 110–11 Modern Sociology (Li), 90–95

288 

• Index

monogamy, 101, 113, 187 Montesquieu, 74, 104, 239n13 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 114 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 87, 96 Morgan, Stephen L., 236n35 Morishita Hiroshi, 127, 144, 148, 246n38 Morishita Jintan Com­pany, 127, 141, 144–45 Morse, Edward S., 149 The ­Mother (Gorki), 212 Mouffe, Chantal, 256n23 “Mu dan ting hai hun ji” (Tang), 179f Muñoz, José Esteban, 245n12 Murray, Hugh, 75 Mu Xiangyue, 42, 55 Nakagawa Shizuka, 127, 148, 247n47 Nakajima Masao, 148 Nakamura Masano. See Nakamura Keiu Nakamura Keiu, 77 Nakayama Taichi, 59, 127, 141–44, 148, 246n40 Nakayama Taiyōdō, 59, 127, 134, 141–44, 246n40 nakedness and interiority, 17, 162–90 Nancy, Jacques, 228 Nanjing Treaty, 23 Nanyang ­Brothers Tobacco Com­pany (nbt), 34, 39–42, 236n29 narcissism, 17, 171–73, 177–83, 210–12 nasakom, 206–8, 254n23 nationalism, 38–40, 223–24, 228 Nationalist Party, 44, 73, 84, 174, 187–88 Nationalist Revolution of 1911, 36, 58, 73 natu­ral law, 66, 88–89, 92–94 natu­ral rights: and advertising and capitalism, 50, 61, 140, 160; and communism and ­women, 187, 196, 209, 213, 217, 225–26; and the event of ­women, 3, 6, 9, 14, 225–26; and He-­Yin Zhen, 62–66; and sociology, 71–72, 116, 121–22 natu­ral science, 4, 7, 16, 75–106, 111, 116–21, 185 natu­ral se­lection, 15, 79, 105, 115, 118 New Citizens News, 123 New Culture Movement, 82, 101, 104, 107, 151 New Erya (Wang, Ye), 77–79, 83, 110 new intellectuals, 103–6 new ­women, 185–87, 220 New ­Women (Ruan), 212 New York cigarettes, 153–57 New Youth (journal), 40, 84, 115 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 115 Ni Gaofeng, 127 Norris, Christopher, 159 “Nüzi jiefanglun” (Li), 89

Olympia (Manet), 163 “On Instructions Regarding the Creation of ‘­Great Wall of the Southern Sea’ and Shooting the Film” ( Jiang), 214 On Social Evolution (Ariga), 107–10, 242n20 Open Doors (Bramsen), 234n10 The Origin of the ­Family, Private Property and the State (Engels), 81, 96 Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, 213 “Our Lives” ( Jiang), 213 Outline of Sociology (Li), 93 Outlines of Sociology (Ward), 111 Owen, Richard, 79 Pacific Commercial Com­pany of Manila, 55, 234n6 Pan Guangdan, 17, 76–77, 120, 170–74, 178–84, 212 Pan Yuliang, 162–64 Pasteur, Louis, 185 patriarchy, 16, 61–66, 69, 79, 87, 91, 96, 183–85 patrilineal families, 54, 97, 101, 117, 153 Patton, Paul, 8 Peng Changxin, 25 The Peony Pavilion (Tang), 175–79, 186 ­People’s Republic of China, 5, 72, 97, 192, 199 ­People’s War, 188–89, 254n29 Pepsodent Com­pany, 169–70, 174 Petrilli, Susan, 241n1 Philips, D. F., 114 Philosophies of ­Human Life (Li), 115 The Philosophy of the View of Life in Modern Chinese Thought (Issy), 233n26 physiology. See also zoology: and advertising and commodities, 34, 38, 61, 69, 135, 143–44, 159–60; communism and femininity and, 209–12, 216; and the event of ­women, 2–4, 7–9, 63–66, 72, 220–27; and female nakedness and interiority, 17, 165, 170–71, 177, 183–86; and sociology, 76–77, 81, 86–90, 93–98, 240n22; and vernacular sociology, 16, 104–5, 111, 114–15, 119–21; ­women and advertising and, 60–61, 69; and w ­ omen’s natu­ral rights, 63–65, 72, 121 Plekhanov, Georgi, 85 Poffenberger, Albert T., 149 Pond’s Cold Cream, 126–28, 132–33 Ponzio, Augusto, 241n1 popu­lar sociology. See sociology The Princi­ples of Advertising (Tipper), 134, 149 Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy ( James), 114

Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy (Spencer), 114 The Princi­ples of Scientific Management (Taylor), 42 Printers Ink, 133 psychoanalytic theory, 12, 17, 72, 76, 136, 167, 171–72, 177–82, 232n20 The Psy­chol­ogy of Advertising (Scott), 134, 140, 149 The Psy­chol­ogy of the Emotions (Ribot), 114 Pun Ngai, 193 Pure Sociology (Ward), 81, 89 Qing dynasty, 42, 58, 76, 101, 174, 182, 185–86 Qinghua University, 194, 201 qipao, 1, 193–94, 203–7, 215–18, 254n27 Qiu Jin, 61–63, 225 The Question of ­Women in Chinese Feminism (Barlow), 244n50 Qu Qiubai: about, 15, 80–81, 240n26; and the event of ­women, 16, 172, 182, 225, 228–29, 240n33; sociology and, 12, 15, 62, 71–74, 80–87, 90–93, 96–98, 108 Qu Shiying, 83 race and racism, 4, 101–5, 112, 116, 120, 148–49, 244n50 Raltsevich, Vasily, 92 Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Elshakry), 240n23 Reaumur, Renè Antoine Ferchault de, 2 Red Guard, 1, 188, 191–205, 210–11, 214–15, 218 reductionism, 222–23 Rees, Abraham, 75 reformism, 93–94, 121, 183–87 Reinhardt, Anne, 35 reproductive ­labor, 2–3, 15, 90–91, 119–22, 162. See also sexual difference; sexuality “Research on Feng Xiaoqing” (Pan), 171 “The Responsibilities of ­Women in ­Evolution” (Ke), 118 revolutionary politics and thought: ­commodities and ­women and, 133, 160; communism and femininity and, 191–95, 200–215; and the event of ­women, 5–6, 11–12, 66, 71, 224–30; and female nakedness and interiority, 184–89; sociology and social, 72–80, 83–87, 97–98 Ribot, Théodule-­Armand, 114 Rip Off Wang Guangmei’s Evil Disguise (publication), 205, 214 Roberts, Rosemary, 218

Index  •  2 8 9

Robinson, William, 158–59 Rocha, Leon, 243n34 Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, 73, 98 Roo­se­velt, Theodore, 73, 136 Rosenbaum, B., 127 Ruan Lingyu, 212 rural areas: and communism, 47f1.42, 187–89, 192, 200, 213; and trade in China, 29, 53–56, 59–60, 71 Ryder, John A., 90 Saito Tsuyoshi, 77 Sakai, Naoki 252n56 Sakai Toshihiko, 89, 239n19 Sang Bing, 73, 238n6 Sanger, Margaret, 113, 166 Sarris, Andrew, 169 Schaff, Adam, 100, 241n1 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 88, 241n36 Schleiden, Matthias Jakob, 2 Schneider, Lauren, 233n26 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 81 Schwann, Theodor, 2 Scientism in Chinese Thought (Kwok), 233n26 Scott, Joan, 12 Scott, Walter Dill, 134–36, 140, 149, 246n24 sexual difference. See also reproductive ­labor; ­women: and advertising, 61, 135, 142–45, 149, 158–59; communism and femininity and, 192, 198, 213; and the event of ­women, 12, 69, 182–83, 225–27, 232n20; and sociology, 15–16, 71–74, 79–91, 105, 114, 159 sexuality: and advertising, 41, 45, 61, 132–33, 143, 148, 154–60; communism and femininity and, 202, 207, 212, 217–18; and the event of ­women, 2–4, 7, 11–12, 63–66, 69, 220, 224–27; nakedness and interiority and, 17, 162–74, 184, 190; and sociology, 72, 76–82, 87–101; and vernacular sociology, 110–22 sexual se­lection, 6, 34, 72, 77–82, 87–94, 101, 105, 110–22, 133, 166, 240n22 Shakespeare, William, 232n16 Shanghai Times, 67 Shehui tongquan (Yan), 104 Shehui xuejie (Gao), 119 Shen, Tsing-­song Vincent, 103–4, 116 Shenbao (newspaper), 51, 126–27 Shenchang yanghang. See amco Shengjing shibao (newspaper), 141, 144–47 Shi Zhecun, 163 Shibue Tomotsu, 112–13 290 

• Index

Shijing (Confucius), 125 Shusui, 12 Simmel, George, 13, 71, 83 Six Canons of Xie He (Xie He), 249n17 Smith, Adam, 74 Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (Chiang), 73 social logics, 11, 53, 62, 76, 79, 82. See also sociology social prob­lems, 6–7, 86, 92–94, 99–102, 110, 116–22, 135, 183–89 Social Psy­chol­ogy (McDougall), 114 social science. See sociology sociology: about, 11–15, 71–99, 239n13, 241n40, 242n23; and advertising, 48–50, 53–54, 125–26, 135, 143, 148–49, 159–60; vernacular, 16–17, 99–122, 125, 135, 150, 157–60, 183, 186, 210 Sociology World (Gao), 119 “The Soliloquy of the Performer” (Jiang), 211 Song Xiaopeng, 193 Soong, T. V., 39 sovereignty, Chinese, 35–36, 39, 55, 61 Spakowski, Nicola, 193 Spalding, Douglas Alexander, 114 Spencer, Herbert: influence of, 13, 74, 90, 238n77; and social science, 77, 81, 111, 114–15, 119, 242n20, 242n23 Spinoza, Baruch, 2, 81 The Spirit of Laws (Montesquieu), 74, 104 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 170–71 Stalin, Joseph, 92, 199 Standard Oil Com­pany of New York (­socony), 23, 29–31, 44, 47, 135–38 The Statistical Year-­Book of the World Power Conference, 1933/34 (Brown), 33 Stone, Galen L., 234n6 Stopes, Marie, 118 The Storm (Ostrovsky), 213 story ads, 150–55, 169–70, 199, 212 Straight, Willard D., 234n6 Stuckenberg, J. H. W., 111 Study of Sociology (Spencer), 74 Subandrio, 254n29 Sukarno, 1, 199–201, 205–9, 215, 254n29 Sun, Lung-­Kee, 115 Sun Benwen, 98, 120–21 Sunlight soap, 126, 130f4.6, 174 Sun Wukong, 196 Sun Yatsen, 208 Su Shangda, 127 Swope, Gerard, 25, 31, 55–56

Tang, Ying, (Yin Tang) 220–22 Tang Shaojie, 252n1 Tang Xianzu, 179f5.10 Tan Sitong, 63, 182, 244n55 Tao Menghua, 98 Tarde, Gabriel, 71, 81–83 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 42, 55 Taylorism, 38, 55, 131, 144 Tazoe Tetsuji, 66 technology transfer, 33, 233n26 “A Teensy Question” (Qu), 86 Thompson, J. Arthur, 118 Three Lectures on Chinese Philosophy (Li), 115 Tianyan lun (Yan), 104–5 Tiger, Lionel, 243n47 Tipper, Harry, 127, 134, 149 Titian, 163 Tiver, Lionel, 118 Toscano, Alberto, 229 Toyama Shoichi, 107 Trademark Gazette, 44, 47 treaty-­ports. See also corporate imperialism: and commercial ephemera, 124, 134, 160–61; and interiority, 172, 180; and trade in China, 15, 19–20, 23–25, 29, 34–36, 44–45, 48, 56–60, 67–68 Trotsky, Leon, 85 Tsu, Jing 224 Tsuboi Shōgorō, 149 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 199–201, 215 United States, 23, 200, 209 van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie, 185 Veblen, Thorstein, 81 Vee Loo Advertising Com­pany, 127, 132 Venus of Urbino (Titian), 163 vernacular sociology. See sociology villages. See rural areas voluntarism: and the event of ­women, 6–7, 64, 68, 210, 217, 220–21, 225; po­liti­cal, 2, 193; and social science, 80–82, 118; theories about, 100, 115, 248n63 Wagel, Srinivas Ram, 57–58, 69–71 Wagner, Rudolf G., 76 Wang Guangmei, 1–3, 17, 191–211, 214–19, 224, 231n1, 252nn1–2, 253n14, 254n27, 254n29, 255n44, 255n47 Wang Guangmei fangtanlu (Huang), 207 Wang Hongwen, 204 Wang Huiwu, 187

Wang Lingzhen, 193 Wang Magu, 150 Wang Rongbao, 77–79, 89 Wang Wanrong, 127 Wang Xiaodan, 103, 106 Wang Zhong, 238n77 Ward, Lester Frank, 13, 75, 81–83, 88–91, 96, 111, 118, 239n19, 240n22, 241n40 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 74 Wei Xin, 117, 158 Wen-­hsin Yeh, 15 Wen Yiduo, 169–70, 173–74, 180–81 White, Hayden, 8 White Terror, 195, 222 Wilkins, Mira, 29–31, 36–38 Wing Tai Vo (wtv), 50–52, 56 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 256n23 ­women. See also feminism; sexual difference: Badiou and, 9–12, 226–30, 232n17, 232n20, 256n26; and commercial ephemera, 16, 123–25, 129–61, 250n37; and communism and femininity, 1–2, 17, 187–219, 230, 255n47, 255nn43–44; the event of, 2–17, 62–70, 184–90, 220–30, 232n17, 232n20; nakedness and interiority and, 17, 162–90, 251n50; new, 185–87, 220; and reproductive ­labor, 2–3, 15, 90–91, 119–22, 162; and sociology, 15–16, 71– 72, 78–83, 86–92, 96–99, 240n33; and trade and advertising in China, 14–15, 19–20, 23–24, 34–41, 45–50, 54, 60–62, 67–69, 246n26; and vernacular sociology, 16, 101–3, 110–13, 116–22; vio­lence against, 188, 220–21, 237n73 ­Women and Socialism (Bebel), 81, 87–89 “­Women at the Center of the Proletarian Movement” (Qu), 86 ­Women in a Pavilion and ­Children Playing by a Lotus Pond (painting), 175 World Energy Production, 1800–1985 (­Etemad, Luciani), 33 wtv, 50–52, 56 Wu Juenong, 225 Wundt, Wilhelm, 71, 81, 164, 246n24 Xia Mianzun, 239n19 Xiandai shehuixue (Li), 62, 90–95 Xiang Jingyu, 187 “Xiaoqing in Lit­er­a­ture and Sexual Psy­chol­ogy” (Pan), 171 Xin Erya (Wang, Ye). See New Erya (Wang, Ye) Xinhai Revolution of 1911, 36, 58, 73 Xinqingnian (journal), 84 Xin shehui (journal), 83–84

Index  •  2 91

Xu Beihong, 164 Xu Dishan, 83 Xu Junjie, 181 Xu Shuzheng, 39 Yamakawa Kikue, 239n19 Yamamoto Taketoshi, 247n50 Yan Fu: about the work of, 12, 16, 62, 117, 154, 183, 242n12, 242n21; and sociology, 74–80, 98, 102–8 Yang Huiya, 163 Yang Yabin, 72–73 Yan Hairong, 193 Yan Jibo, 114–15 Yan Ming, 73, 240n25 Yao Chun’an, 73 Yao Wenyuan, 204 Ye Lan, 77–79, 89 Ye Lin, 253n14 Yimen xueke, yige shidai (Yan), 240n25 Yong Tai He, 50 Yu Dafu, 104 Yudin, Pavel, 92 Zarrow, Peter G., 102 Zelin, Madeline, 42

292 

• Index

Zhang, Bozhao, 51–52 Zhang Chunqiao, 204 Zhang, Jingyuan 173 Zhang, Shaoquin 186 Zhang Taiyan, 79, 182 Zhang Xuecheng, 184 Zhang Ziping, 104 Zhao Hailou, 224 Zhao Wuzhen, 224–25 Zheng Yaonan, 127 Zheng Zhenduo, 83 “Zhishi shi zangwu” (Qu), 84 Zhongguo shehuixue shi, 73 Zhong Shaohua, 82 Zhong Xueping, 193 Zhou Enlai, 199–200 Zhou Jianren, 103, 115–16 Zhou Zuoren, 115 Zhu Lei, 205 Zhu Xi, 54 Žižek, Slavoj, 228 zoology, 72, 87, 90, 98, 102. See also physiology Zuo Jiping, 193 Zuo Xuchu, 44 Zupančič, Alenka, 10–12, 225, 232n20